Fire Will Fall Read Online Free PDF Page A

have a drop of ugly in them. But the universe has been known to play cruel jokes on people like that, and they stand as evidence.
    There does appear to be something kind of wrong—but it's hard to pinpoint. You have to look closely. They're kind of pale and have what looks like a slight bruising at the corners of their mouths and around their eyes. You'd almost think it was shadows. Then, there's some sort of translucent or fluorescent factor to their skin that you can't help staring at. It's not gross. If you're a sci-fi head, you'd say they look a little radioactive. If you're a goth, you might say they look like pretty vampires. It almost looks like a strength instead of a weakness, but that's only if you're using imagination.
    Reality is that they live like early AIDS patients who haven't hit the throes of it yet, only no magazine has had the audacity to make a comparison between their Q3 and the AIDS virus. Their drug protocol is very similar, and yet it's politically correct to hope that the Trinity Four, as they're called, will be cured relatively quickly. Q3 is a cruel virus, allowing them to feel normal on lots of days. But as soon as they get their hopes up that they're improving, they get flu symptoms and slamming headaches. I've got the inside scoop on them. For a number of reasons, the Trinity Four is personal to me.
    I laid the magazine down on my chest, feeling sleep coming on. I was almost asleep, because I'm pretty regulated. I lie down at 10:00 and almost never see my digital clock hit 10:05. Tonight, I heard Shahzad Hamdani's keypad clattering from across the hall in my mom's old room. Hamdani is not regulated at all—up, down, up, down, all night, since there hasn't been a need for a schedule. In Pakistan, you're allowed to quit school after eighth grade, so Hamdani hasn't seen the inside of the Halls of Knowledge in three years, except for his first day of school in America, when he met me. Our hacking escapades got us in trouble immediately, and hence it was also his last day. He says that even in Karachi he did his best hacking and v-spying between two in the morning and sunrise. He generally knows to be quiet between 10:00 and 10:05, but once I'm out, I'm not an evil prick about his noise.
    "Hel-lo?" I hollered across the hall to him. "My five minutes, please? Do I ask for a lot in this thing we call our life?"
    "
Yerklun un stivach,
" he mumbled, or some such thing, which could mean anything from "one more minute" to "bite me" in one of the twenty or so languages he can converse in, not including dialects. It's a gift. He jokes that he was born crying in three languages.
    I fought my compulsive desire to blast him, stuffed the magazine under my pillow where it belonged, and headed across the hall. The clincher wasn't
what
he was saying but the fact that he wasn't speaking English. Hamdani only forgets what language he's in when he's totally absorbed.
    He was now staring into the glow of his screen, his light off. His profile glowed blue, and his fist was pushed up against his mouth as he thought. His hand flopped down on the mouse, and he drummed his fingers on top.
    I reached for the switch and turned on the overhead, which only caused him to flinch and lean closer to the screen. "
Yerklun un stivach...
"
    "English, dude. You're in America."
    "Sorry. I am wondering if I should send to USIC this dead-dog article."
    "I thought our interest was dead people." I scanned the wall in front of him, where my mother used to have a mirror. It's just a bare wall now, except that Hamdani has taped up hard copies of eight or nine recent news stories from MSNBC, most of them only a few paragraphs long. "Six Die as Mystery Illness Grips Cruise Line." "Food Poisoning Suspected in 11 Deaths at Mardi Gras." "Dengue Fever Claims 9 in Nepal Hotel District." "Mystery Disease in Tripura Claims 14 on British Military Base."
    He finds the stories buried in worldwide news about dirty politicians, crimes, forest fires ... He