Blood Zero Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

lanyards and winches, and grip the wheel with my tiny hands, just like Dad taught me. He wordlessly tosses his cigar into the drink—we never call it “the water,” it has to be “the drink”—and lumbers down into the cabin. His urine starts up. I like the sound.
    “Hey, May?” he says, his voice muffled.
    “Hey what?” I say. He taught me to answer like that.
    His voice drifts up from the cabin below: “I know you’re different, but don’t ever let the other kids give you crap about it, alright?”
    Right now I don’t really understand what he means by “different.” In a few years it’ll make sense, but by then it’ll be too late. For now, I think maybe he means I have special powers, like Superman or something.
    “Okay,” I say.
    This is the only time in my life he will ever mention my “difference.”
    Sounds float up to me: he zips up his fly, he cracks another beer.
    I steer us straight through the dark on a path marked with magical light.
    ~~~
    I walk the shopping plaza’s marbled halls. The grand, vaulted ceiling soars 120 feet above me, smooth white buttresses holding at bay a fragmented, glass-clamped night sky.
    My IC beeps, and the screen shows that it’s Randal calling again.
    I understand his anxiety about the presentation tomorrow morning; God only knows what will happen when we tell the Company’s board that they’re headed for the first financial loss in a generation. But talking about it endlessly with my madly neurotic best friend won’t help. When he’s stressed, he rambles and stutters and pulls his own hair, and it drives me nuts.
    Me, when I’m stressed out, I wander the shopping plaza.
    I ignore the call.
    Amid the crush of countless milling shoppers, a couple walks past me, holding hands, all perfect hair and plastic skin. Do I imagine it, or are their eyes vacant, windows into the souls of mindless dolls? (It’s the pills that do it. Smiles on their faces and nothing behind their eyes. N-Pharm, at your service.) Their lips move, but they don’t speak to one another. Each of them is talking to someone else on their ICs. The man mumbles about interest rates, the woman chirps about the fall line, and they pass me by.
    My gut knots up as they drift into periphery, and my neck seizes with pain and tension. The hatred, the contempt I feel for these people scares me, but it isn’t their vapidity that bothers me. No, it’s their love. Because like all the couples I see in this place they can be together openly, and they take that blessing for granted.
    They’re gone, and I pass a planter where a tall palm tree grows, surrounded by a bristling pot of fake flowers. I pass a bench. I pass a makeup store with a tall, thoroughbred of a woman standing out front handing out samples of lip gloss. She gives some packets to a group of teenage girls as they pass, favoring them with a smile dripping with self-satisfied boredom. When I pass, she doesn’t even hold out a packet.
    In the dark hollows of my heart, a voice cackles at her: You bitch, you don’t even know: I’ll be a Blackie one day. And I hate her for not noticing me, not seeing me.
    Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised by her not handing me lip gloss: I’m dressed like a man.
    Women wearing pants went out of fashion years ago, when N-Style first decided to go with gender-specific clothing as a matter of policy. Since then, Cranton studies showed that nonconformist dress was a workplace distraction and a drag on productivity, and the practice was strictly forbidden by the HR handbook.
    Unfortunately, it’s only when I’m wearing pants and a tie with my hair pulled back and stuffed under a hat like this that I truly feel like myself. It’s my release, my happy place. And, yes, maybe the forbidden nature of the act adds to the thrill.
    So far I haven’t been caught. But even if my dirty little secret were to get back to Blackwell and his HR cronies, I have plenty of credit to pay whatever fines they might charge me, and