"Sarah Zettel - Kingdom of Cages" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zettel Sarah)

Tam hoped the woman was smart and strong. Otherwise, both Basante
and Dionte could quite easily get what they wanted.


Chena Trust lay awake in the darkness, blinking at a thick, blank, silent
wall.
After a few million seconds of this, she rolled over on her back and
listened. Beyond the breathing, rustling, snoring people, she heard
another world. It chirruped, peeped, and murmured with a whole set of
rhythms that followed no pattern Chena could make out. It was nothing
like their home on Athena Station, which she, her little sister, and their
mother had left a week or so ago. On the station, she could tell what was
happening in the world by the clicks, creaks, and whooshes that filtered
through the ancient walls. Here, it was just noises all piled up on top of
each other.
Chena burrowed under her covers, but sleep didn't come back.
What are you afraid of? She asked herself. You're here now. It's stupid
to be scared of the place. You 're not going back.
She wanted a light, an info screen, and a jack for her wrist comptroller,
so she could find out something about this place she was in, but none of
that stuff existed here. The walls stared back at Chena, blank,
immutable, silent. Everything she knew was up in the sky
somewhereтАФthe curving, insulated hallways with their cameras and input
screens, the kilometer-long spiral staircases, which were always too cold
or too hot and forever too loud no matter how much sound damping
they'd put up, their tiny apartment with its peeling carpetтАФthese were all
the past. And the futureтАж
Was the future really a mud hut in the jungle? That was what Eng and
King said. Chena poked her head out from under the covers again.
"They give you a spear and make you hunt things." King had hopped
around grunting, with a big grin on his face, like he thought he was doing
a public service. "You're going to look real sweet swinging from a vine,
Chena. This is how you're going to look." He grabbed a corner bracket
and let himself swing back and forth until the caution alarm buzzed at
them, with Eng laughing that stupid horsey laugh of his the whole time.
They can both just piss off. What do they know? They were born on
Athena too. They just know what they see on the screen. Chena
scratched at the gauze bandage sealed to the back of her hand. This
place isn't mud. It's stone and wood. It isn't anything like mud.
Mom wouldn't really make them live in the jungle. She wouldn't do that
to them. This was just a temporary stop. They'd move someplace real in
maybe a week or so. Mom had a job. They weren't going to stay here.
Chena rubbed the bandage harder. Her skin still stung where they had
inserted the new ID chip and then imprinted a multibranched tattoo on
top of it. All that had been done by the same woman in white overalls
who'd spent the morning quizzing Chena. Where was she from, what did
she weigh, what did she eat, how often had she been sick, was she sick
now, how did she do in school, did she go to school, or did she just
learn off the computer? Where did they live on Athena, had they always
lived on Athena? Who was her mother, her father, her grandparents, her