Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 Read Online Free PDF Page A

drugs had dilated her pupils till they looked as black and bot-tomless as deep wells. Dry wells; there was no glitter of interest or spark of life. Though she was probably in sixth or seventh grade, she had the prom-ise of womanly beauty beneath the skin of a baby. Deadly combination.

Girls matured earlier every generation and Heath thought she could smell menstrual blood. In the woods she noticed both girls' legs were en-crusted with grime. How much was blood and how much dirt, she won-dered. To cover the grim thoughts, Heath smiled into those empty eyes. The girl who'd spoken first was quite tall. Heath had noticed when she'd walked next to Gwen. Gwen was five-foot-ten and this slender reed of a girl wasn't much shorter. Judging height was another thing her fall had affected. Sitting down, everyone seemed to tower. Often Heath felt like an egret among the cows.

The tall girl sat in a webbed lawn chair, her feet in Gwen's lap. The child was mostly legs and what Heath imagined, when shampooed, was blond hair-the long, pale, silky kind that most teenagers want and pre-cious few have. Even ratty and caked with grime the hair hung to the middle of her back. There was something utterly familiar about this girl and Heath wracked her brain trying to remember if she'd seen her around the park, in the Visitors' Center maybe, or at an eatery in town.

Then it came to her. She looked like Skipper, Barbie's little sister, right down to the preternatural long legs and stick-straight hair. Down to the blank doll-like expression on her face and the unfocused painted-on eyes.

"They aren't talking," she said to her aunt, suddenly realizing the quiet was unnatural.

"I know," Gwen said.

"Skipper can talk," Heath said. "The girl you've got. She said, 'It's a dog,' back in the woods."

"She doesn't want to talk now, do you, sweetheart?" Gwen said kindly.

Heath turned to the red-haired girl with a death-grip on her hand. "What's your name?"

The eyes seemed to grow larger, darker, till they resembled what Heath had always imagined interstellar black holes looked like: places where nothing could survive-not matter, not rock, not steel.

"Can I call you 'limpet'?" Heath took the silence for just that, silence, and stopped prodding. She was afraid she was too heavy-handed, too inept, and would cause more damage. "Come here, Wiley."

The dog obediently trotted to between Heath's knees and those of the girl.

"You can hold onto Wiley if you want. I do it when I'm totally freaked out. It always makes me feel better." The limpet looked at the dog and reached out tentatively.

Her hand was babyish, dimples where knuckles would one day be, wrists barely defined. Her finger ends were raw and bloody. The black of dirt and old blood caked under the nails and in the tiny creases in the once-smooth skin.

"Go ahead. Pet him. He doesn't mind. I think it makes him feel important."

The small hand closed in the thick fur of the dog's ruff. Wiley sat very still and grinned.

"They can understand us at least," Heath said to her aunt, then: "Oh shit, we should call somebody," as she remembered her responsibilities.

"I already tried," Gwen said. Skipper's feet were cleaned and bound. The doctor set them gently on the ground and moved over to attend to the limpet's feet. "Cell phone won't work in this canyon. The guy camped next to us offered to drive in toward town till he could get a signal and call the rangers."

"Good." Heath should have thought of that. Since the accident, things had been dropping through the cracks in her brain. Sometimes it felt as if, in losing her legs, her independence and her mobility, she'd lost part of her mind as well. She'd wondered-but never dared to ask the doctors for fear they'd add "crazy" to the list of things wrong with her- if the much-vaunted "muscle memory" was an actual real thing, bits of knowledge stored, not in the cells of the brain, but cached in cells in other parts of the body. When her brain had lost contact