Kelley Eskridge Read Online Free PDF Page B

stopped the car on a patch of gravel
close to the place where the dunes began their slow hump to the sea.
The air was cooler here, slow and full of salt, dark brine on the back
of Jackal's tongue. She hoisted the carrybag and Snow pulled a blanket
from the trunk, and they turned automatically toward the path that led
up to the cliffs.
    They spread the blanket by a stagger of
boulders that deflected some of the breeze. The sun was setting
quickly; Snow dialed her portable lamp to low, so there was just enough
light to see the cliff edge fifteen feet away. Jackal ignored the
sandwiches and went straight for the wine, then fumbled in the bottom
of the bag. “Corkscrew?”
    Snow snorted, took the bottle and held it
in the crook of her right arm while she tweezered her thumb and index
finger around the nail of her left little finger. She tugged hard: the
nail extruded a half inch and then folded out of her fingertip like an
accordion. She pulled it out to a three inch length and twisted; the
sections locked into a smooth spike that she used to slit the foil
covering and skewer the cork. She handed Jackal the bottle and worked
the cork slowly off her nail, watching Jackal watch her. “It's never
too late to be your own best tool,” she said.
    Jackal raised both eyebrows again. “I
don't need a corkscrew that badly.”
    “It's more than a corkscrew. Anyway,
that's not the point.”
    Jackal turned up her hands in a way that
said Fine, we've had this discussion before .
She drank: the wine made the inside of her mouth feel hollow and large.
She settled as best she could against a rock, drank again, rolling the
tannin around her tongue and enjoying the warmth of the wine in her
chest. They traded the bottle back and forth in silence for a longish
time.
    “I feel differently about it than I used
to,” Snow said after a while. She sat opposite Jackal with her back
against a squat pillar of stone, her knees drawn up and her head bent.
Long fingers of hair had worked themselves loose from the clip she
always wore, that looked like carved ivory, the same pale yellow as the
hair it bound. Snow didn't care that it shocked people; having assured
herself the ivory wasn't real, she had no need to reassure anyone else.
Jackal had seen Snow leave people in mid-sentence, or tasks not quite
finished, or holomovies just before the final scene, if it occurred to
her that there was something else she should be doing. Where her mind
leapt, her body followed with a singleness of purpose that had at some
point upset almost everyone who knew her. Except for Carlos, who told
Jackal, “It's not true that Snow is easily distracted. In fact, I'd say
she was the most focused person I've ever met. It just bothers people
when she is so clearly not focused on them.”
    Snow was studying her hand, the little
finger and the white oval face of the digital display set into her
wrist, that could be programmed to tell her the time and temperature
and emergency call numbers for any city in the world. “It was a
practical thing,” she said. “They're tools, they're useful.” She
lowered her knees into a tailor's seat and braced her hands on them,
fingers splayed, unusually gold in the light of the lamp. “But it turns
out it's more than that,” she continued slowly, turning her hands in
the light. “They make me feel, I don't know…elegant, enhanced. Like
Jaoli on my team who wears silk panties under her coveralls when she's
out installing the power grid in a manufacturing plant. I'm starting to
think they make me feel closer to some ideas I have about myself, that
I'm competent and also…” She frowned, rubbed her fingers together as if
she could snap the thought into coherence. “I don't think I'd want
something I couldn't use some-how. The cosmetic stuff doesn't work for
me. But maybe being able to screw a steel horn into your forehead does
the same thing for those folks that my polymer nail does for me. Maybe
it gets them closer to