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

here it is: I decided to make things easier for myself by refusing even then, just as I refuse now, to feel even a tiny bit guilty about, you know.
    That.
     
    Kit was over at the Eislers’ constantly, right from the start. She wanted to hear the stories and help look after you—which she was annoyingly good at—and she said she needed to get out of the apartment because her mother was acting “wa-wa.”
    “What do I mean, ‘wa-wa’? I mean that she is like totally freaked, ever since you tell her about Mayo being on Ararat. Eyes is jumping around like two mice on hot plate. OK, so he was her boss, and instead of Mr. Smooth Science Guy, he is some kind of crazy. So I expect, you know, she is upset. But not like this. Fourteen-hour days is normal for my mother. Twenty hour, not so much. Probably thinks she can figure everything out single-handed. Understand what happened to Daniel. Explain Ararat. Explain what her boss was doing. Save whole world from creepy Architects if only she never sleeps.”
    “Sounds like someone else I know,” Rosko said pointedly.
    “Yah,” she said, giving me a long stare. “Like Morag, who also is putting herself under too much stress, also getting, how is it, snapple?”
    “Snappish,” I snapped.
    “My mother is all freaked because she is in middle of big something at her lab, and Institute’s fancy mainframe computer is acting all screw-loose since a week at least, and her favorite student, who does all her coding and babysits the computer has, ka-pow, what you say, puff of smoke.”
    “Disappeared? That’s the code geek she shared with Mayo, isn’t it? Carl Bates?”
    She nodded. “Is no big deal, I think, but my mother is like, total hysteria. Invites him to dinner, because she thinks he is lonely over the summer and needs a mother. He says, ‘Yes, thank you for invitation, Professor, I’d love to come.’ And I say to Natazscha, ‘What you think we feed him, given you are worst cook in history of world?’ This is true, actually. She makes Ukrainian stew with lentils, and smell is maximum bad, maximum, like you microwave old running socks. Whole apartment you can’t breathe. And, lucky for that, he never shows up. I say to her, ‘Good, relax, he probably forgot. Or he went on vacation or something.’”
    Not wanting to deal with her mother’s problems, Kit had plenty of incentive to hang with us at the Eislers—even though Rosko liked yanking her chain. “One thing I don’t understand,” he said. “Why is your mother’s English so much better than yours? It’s not like she’s a Babbler.”
    “No, Rosko, she is not freak like you and Morag. But she studies English in school ten, fifteen years, and I study two years. Also, she is obsessive-competitive—”
    “Compulsive.”
    “Whatever. Work maniac.”
    For me, having Kit around was wonderful. And also—how shall I put this?—really difficult. Because it meant that, on top of everything else, I was forced to put up with another, if possible even more painful layer of confusion and inner struggle.
    Over and over, from the first time I saw her again, I said to myself:
    No, Morag.
    No.
    Be calm. Be sensible.
    Bad bad bad even to think about this now.
    You don’t feel this way really. You only think you do.
    I’d say things like that to myself while my back was turned to her, while maybe she fixed you a sandwich or played cards with you. (She was the one who discovered that you could still play, and enjoy, a game like Hearts.) I’d shuffle blindly through something on my screen, resisting and resisting the temptation to glance back at her.
    Work, Morag. Work on Bill’s notes about the Disks. Or the few bits of Shul-hura’s Babylon tablets that you still haven’t translated. Or why not email some random people who might have known Mayo?
    Everyone goes on about your brain, so use it.
    Then I’d glance back at her. And maybe her face would be at a new angle, or lit differently, or I’d be just in time to