Last Light (Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page B

pre-packed travel kit of toiletries, she went into the kitchen. She kept twenty thousand dollars in a secret stash in the cabinet to the left of the refrigerator.
    Although confident and practiced at concealing her difference from other people, Makani had never been able to free herself of a measure of paranoia. Rainer Sparks had been right when he suggested that anyone with the ability to read minds, even to a limited extent, would be feared and hated if her power were revealed. A public stoning would not be in the cards these days. But depending on who discovered that she could read them by a touch, a bullet to the head or a razor-sharp stiletto across the throat was not an unlikely fate. Therefore, she kept the getaway money in a metal lockbox in the kitchen.
    She removed cook pots of various sizes, set them aside, lifted an inch-thick slab of Melamine that served as the false floor of the cabinet, and extracted the foot-square three-inch-deep box that contained stacks of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills tightly wrapped in plastic.
    In the bedroom again, she transferred the cash to the overnight bag, wishing that her simmering paranoia had also induced her to buy a firearm. She didn’t like guns. She had never struck another human being in anger, and although she was not a pacifist, she had always found it difficult to imagine committing an act of significant violence. Until now. She didn’t like guns, yeah, okay, but she also didn’t like dentists’ drills, either, and yet she got her cavities filled when they were discovered. Now she thought that she’d been stupid when she’d considered guns evil. Revolvers, dental drills, pistols, hammers—they were tools, nothing more than tools, and
evil
was a word applicable only to people and their worst actions.
    Rainer Sparks had promised to rape her and kill her. She had read enough of him, through one touch, to be certain that between the sexual assault and the murder, he would enjoy torturing her in ways that she, in her naïveté, could not imagine.
    He
was evil.
    And she had no defense against him.
    Makani latched the suitcase and stood staring at the bedside telephone, trying to think of someone she knew who was likely to have a firearm. She couldn’t bring a single name to mind. On the other hand, maybe
everyone
she knew was armed as if for imminent war. Maybe she’d wrongly assumed that the people she liked all shared her aversion to guns.
    She longed for the sea, for the dependability of its rhythms, for the honesty of water in motion, which could be read reliably, for depths that concealed nothing worse than sharks. Oceans were the antithesis of the sea of humanity. Oceans killed, but without anger or intent. For all the poets who wrote of the soul of the ocean, the waters could not envy, neither could they hate. Oceans did not revel in their power, and the storms that afflicted them always passed, as the storms of the human heart never quite did. At night, in the dark of the moon and the faintness of stars, the rolling waters did not dream of blood.
    Although she had changed clothes, she suddenly realized that the faint smell of spilled beer clung to her skin and hair. No time to wash even her face, and certainly not her hair.
    After setting the suitcase beside the front door, Makani hurried into the kitchen. She pulled open the knife drawer and considered the array of blades. No item of culinary cutlery would serve her as well as a dagger or a switchblade, but it would be better than nothing.
    Rainer Sparks allowed her to be aware of him only when he thrust the handheld Taser against her neck and triggered it.
    She fell.
    Knees, elbows, and one side of her head rapped the mahogany floor, which seemed to distort and thrum beneath her, as if it were the stretched-tight membrane of a trampoline, though she did not rebound from the hardwood.
    Pain was the least of it. The electric current traveled every byway of her peripheral nervous system, wreaking havoc with