Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

superficial physical health, the people the Architects had left behind as blanks, as empty husks, were dying.
    What was I to believe? What was I to do? Why could I no longer even concentrate on what to believe or do? One thing I did, even though I’d kind of guessed it’d be useless, was persuade Gabi Eisler to be the designated grown-up and take you to a doctor, then a neurologist, then a shrink. Three pale balding men in their fifties: they could have been brothers.
    Or parrots on a perch: “We can do nothing for these people.”
    I was really just going through the motions—no stone unturned and all. But “these people”—how dare they? Violent impulses aren’t usually my thing, but I imagined them saying what they were so clearly thinking— The Mysteries are a lost cause; let it go; we shouldn’t waste resources on them —and then I imagined punching their oversized noses.
    It wasn’t their fault. I just wanted them to have answers because I didn’t. So much for the cool, intellectually hyperconfident, somewhere-on-the-spectrum savant. So much for the miniature know-it-all, blinking cutely in the glare of the Shanghai TV lights. That’s who I was supposed to be, D. That’s how I’d been constructed . An adult genius in a child’s body. A thinking machine. A once-in-a-lifetime phenom. Daughter of archaeologists can speak twelve languages, has “unmeasurable” IQ, et cetera, et cetera, et bloody cetera. I’d spent seventeen years surrounded by those bright, tinny trumpet notes of amazement and ignorant praise. And now, when I needed it most, my confidence in my own understanding, even my own mental stability, was no longer just lower than people had come to expect. It was zero.

    Nobody suggested we move back into your parents’ house, or use it, or even visit, and at the beginning I was way too fried to argue with Gabi Eisler’s brittle hausfrau efficiency. She welcomed us, fussed over us, and laughed too loud in short bursts, like a person with depression in a smiley-face T-shirt. She also shoveled enormous quantities of heavy, wintery food at us—chili with corn bread, sausages with shredded red cabbage and mashies, great steaming bricks of beef-and-mushroom lasagna. You ate it all, mechanically and without interest, like an engine that needs fuel—and you still lost weight. Me, I pushed it around on my plate, tried to make the right noises of gratitude, and gave most of it to you or Rosko when she wasn’t looking. When she thought I wasn’t looking, she’d reach out and touch his damaged face, her eyes bright with tears. She was trying to pretend—to me and to herself—that she’d forgiven me for nearly getting him killed. She was trying to pretend, also, that you weren’t giving her the creeps.
    She made up a temporary bedroom, two camp cots divided by a curtain in their half-finished basement. It smelled of old paint and dryer lint. And maybe it was the physical claustrophobia, or the guilt and helplessness I felt every time I looked at you, or my fears for the future, but down there I felt myself turning into a person I just didn’t much like.
    I was pissed off with Gabi and Stefan for their frosty hospitality—as if they owed me any other kind! I was pissed off with all the people whose brains I’d have picked, if only they hadn’t all been so inconsiderately dead. (Julius Quinn. Mayo. Both your parents. Derek Partridge.) I even got pissed off with Rosko, because he’d totally clammed up about Ararat; oh aye, and because one afternoon he actually said, “Morag, what are you so pissed off about?” Boy, did that do the trick!
    Giving me a constant stream of advice was one of his techniques for not talking about himself.
    “You have to sleep more, Morag. And eat more. And drink less coffee. Maybe get away from Seattle to somewhere you feel safer and can relax. Some friends of my parents have a poky little cabin out on the Olympic Peninsula that we could use. At least put some