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

drops in your eyes—they look terrible.”
    I wanted to say to him, Thanks, yes, excellent advice, Rosko, and I appreciate the concern, and now please, please would you bugger off, because yes, OK, the drops, I’ll do the drops if you insist, but right now I need to concentrate on, uh, whatever it was I was thinking about a minute ago, and could you at least not stand in the light like that, because this cuneiform of Shul-hura’s that I’m rereading, which by the way seems to suggest that the Architects said they’d come back when we were ready, is a swine to read in the best of circs, the individual wedges small as a rat’s teeth, and—
    My eyes were red because I was getting even less sleep than normal. Also because every third time I looked at you, I had to take a deep breath, steal five minutes of privacy in the loo, and cry. And the sadness, the sense that I’d failed you, was combining with a rising tide of anxiety that threatened to breach my seawall and drown me in pure salt panic. Deer in the headlights? Ha. It was more like deer just galloped off a cliff. When I did get two straight hours of blissful unconsciousness—or, more likely, two straight hours of vile dreams—I’d wake up with my heart hammering, exhausted and desperate.
     
    By way of unpleasant static in the background, the ’rents were still totally off-radar, and I found that I couldn’t stop worrying about them. Jimmy, Lorna: Why why why no message, no contact? After crossing into Armenia, we spent two weeks stuck in Yerevan, while Rosko got one and a half fingers amputated and we jousted with four different national bureaucracies—German, Scottish, American, Armenian—over the delicate matter of being in the wrong country with no paperwork. I got one message from my parents there, just one, saying they were safely out of Iraq. Then nothing. Captured on the border by lethal jihadi wannabes and dragged back to a filthy bunker in Mosul or Raqqa? Captured by the Seraphim themselves in what was left of Turkey? Already killed for ticking the wrong box on the Supernatural Commitments form by some brand-new group with an acronym the West hadn’t even heard of yet? I needed to know . The pinnacle of human achievement, the cherry on western civilization’s five-thousand-layer cake, is that you can post a cat video from any yurt in Kazakhstan. But week after week Jimmy and Lorna sent nothing. We’re still alive —that would have been nice. We’re safe. Even: We’ve been detained, but we’re safe. I could have settled for any of those. Nothing.
    I couldn’t contact Charlie Balakrishnan either. Sure, I’m a seventeen-year-old nobody and he’s a busy international tycoon—a mover and shaker in the financial and industrial ionosphere whose daily worries no doubt range from the well-being and efficiency of thirty thousand employees on five continents to the new custom paint job on his backup Gulfstream. But when the director of his own fancy institute has disappeared, and his old friend Bill Calder ditto, and then he gets messages from me on his corporate email account saying, Daniel and I were at Ararat ,and I heard Julius Quinn’s last words , and I tried to intervene in the Anabasis, and failed, and survived , and Bill and Mayo were there too, and Mayo spoke to me, but they died too , and I need to talk to you, please? Like, yesterday, was it too much to expect that he would take a moment away from the company spreadsheets to snap his fingers and instruct the nearest PA/minion/lackey/aide to press “Call Back” on his gold-plated speakerphone?
    Apparently it was too much to expect.

    It was so irritating to be so irritated—with myself and everyone else. It was like having the worst PMS of my life, for weeks and weeks.
    Can you imagine?
    No, obviously not. Fair enough. So let me cut to the chase. With all that swirling around in my head, I have to get this one thing clear. Out in the open. Out of the way.
    Are you truly ready? Good. So