Orphan of Creation Read Online Free PDF Page B

have much longer to wait.

Interlude
    <>
They locked her in at night with her kind, in the strongest, best-built hut in the village. She lived with the others in squalor and filth inside the well-made walls and solid roof. It kept the night out, kept them out of the night.
She wanted to be free. That much was in her, a solid sure thing, a part of her. Endless times she had tried to escape; endless times they had stopped her. The hut was made as well as it was, thanks to her.
Perhaps she should have been no more aware of her bondage than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. Bondage was her element, the old and only heritage of her line, back through the mists of all half-remembered times. She and her kind had never known anything else. But fish can sense the water—the currents, the smells, the temperature. And she sensed and resented her enslavement, knew it to be wrong, even if she could not understand it. She had no idea but away, no plan but now, no real awareness that time had a past, a present, a future, that today and tomorrow were different. She had only slowly developed the craftiness that taught her to wait until she was unwatched before she tried to run, that made her bide her time, that forced her to scheme and be secret in her efforts to be away.
Tonight, she would try the door again. It was a heavy wooden thing, made of vertical logs set close together with only the slightest of gaps between, hung on stout leather hinges and held shut with a series of thick leather straps firmly tied off from the outside. In the pitch blackness of the cell, she groped for the door, found it, and started chewing at the leather straps.
Part of her knew it wasn’t going to work, that dawn would come long before she finished, that the overseers would see what she had done and beat her again. She didn’t care. She closed her eyes and worked her massive teeth over the salty leather.
Away. Now.

Chapter Three
    Dr. Michael Marchando staggered into the on-call room and flopped down on a bunk. He was exhausted. The Emergency Room had been a madhouse his whole shift long, an endless parade of car-wreck victims and gunshot wounds, seasoned with the usual Thanksgiving catastrophes—allergic reactions to unusual holiday dishes, burns from cooking fires, turkey bones lodged in the throat, excruciating indigestion and cramps brought on by massive overeating, and an upswing in drunk-driver injuries.
    He shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Here he was up in Washington, while Barb was down with that damn family of hers in Mississippi. This was the first Thanksgiving since Barbara and he had split up. He thought back, remembering the holidays they had had together, and wondered what she was doing. Right now, she was probably sound asleep, just about to wake up after a happy day with her family and a peaceful night of rest. Mike had bolted down his turkey early in the day, and left his mother’s place to rush to the hospital and get up to his armpits in the sick and injured. It wasn’t fair.
    He thought ahead to Monday. Barbara had agreed to meet him for dinner. He smiled humorlessly. He had managed to get a date with his own wife. They still spent the occasional night together, whenever Michael could pressure her into it, whenever he could escape from the hospital. It wasn’t any kind of a life. The more he thought about it, the more he saw how unfair it was.
    He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness. It wasn’t fair at all.
    <>
    Barbara woke, not with the sort of disorientation she usually experienced when she found herself in a strange bed, but instead with a preternaturally precise knowledge of where she was. Without opening her eyes, she knew exactly how the covers were wrinkled, precisely how far down the window shades were drawn, just how far the sunlight had made its way into the room, just how many children’s voices she could hear outside.
    She opened her eyes. The near-antique clock on the