Periphery Read Online Free PDF

had terrible, terrible dreams. All your sins returned to you, and all the people you had betrayed. The thrum of those subliminal engines filled my head, everything disappeared. I was walking along the curving corridor again, my doppelganger at vanishing point; but the corridor was suspended in a starry void. The cold was horrific, my lungs were bursting, my body was coming apart. I could see nothing but Miqal’s eyes, mirrors of my terror—
    The hejabi woman clung to me, and I clung to her.
    “Did it happen to you?” we babbled. “Did it happen to you—?”
    “Don’t tell anyone,” I said, when we were brave enough to let go.
    Carpazian was right, the stay of execution was over, and any haunting would have been better than this. We lived from moment to moment, under a sword.
    H15750, N310, O6500, C2250, Ca63, P48, K15, S15, Na10, Cl6, Mg3, Fe1,
    Trace differences, tiny differences, customising that chemical formula into human lives, secrets and dreams. The Buonarotti process, taking that essence and converting it into some inexplicable algorithm, pure information…
    *
    “We’ll have what we’ve managed to carry,” I said. “And no reason why we shouldn’t eat the meat and vegetables, since our bodies will be native to Landfall.”
    “We could materialize thousands of miles apart,” said Hilde.
    “Kitty says it doesn’t work like that.”
    Kitty, the woman whose nickname had been “Flick,” had come out of a closet of her own. She was, as I had always known but kept it to myself, a highly qualified neurochemist. Take a wild guess at her criminal activities. I’d had to fight a reflex of disgust against her, because I have a horror of what hard drugs can do. She and Achmed knew more than the rest of us put together about the actual Buonarotti process. Achmed had refused to talk about it, after his first pronouncement, but Kitty had told us things, in scraps. She said teams like ours would “land” together, in the same physical area, because we’d become psychically linked.
    We were in Hilde’s cabin. She was lying on top of me in the narrow bunk, one of the few comfortable arrangements. It was the sixth “night,” or maybe the seventh. She stroked my nose, grinning.
    “Oh yes, Captain. Very good for morale, Captain. You don’t know.”
    “I don’t know anything, expect it’s cold outside and warm in here.”
    I tipped her off so we were face to face, and made love to her with my eyes closed, in a world of touch and taste. My head was full of coloured stars, the sword was hanging over me, fears I hadn’t known I possessed blossomed in the dark. What’s wrong with her, what kind of terminal genetic error? Why was she condemned, she still has amnesia, what is it that she doesn’t dare to remember? Oh they will turn you in my arms into a wolf or a snake. The words of the old song came to me, because I was afraid of her, and my eyes were closed so I didn’t know what I was holding—
    The texture of her skin changed. I was groping in rough, coarse hair, it was choking me. It changed again; it was scale, slithery and dry. I shot upright, shoving myself away from her. I hit the light. I stared.
    My God.
    “Am I dreaming?” I gasped. “Am I hallucinating?”
    A grotesque, furred and scaly creature shook its head. It shook its head, then slipped and slithered back into the form of a human girl in a red nightdress.
    “No,” said Hilde. “I became what you were thinking. I lost control—”
    Hilde; something else, something entirely fluid, like water running.
    “I told you I had a genetic disease. This is it.”
    “Oh my God,” I breathed. “And you can read my mind?”
    Her mouth took on a hard, tight smile. She was Hilde, but she was someone I’d never met: older, colder, still nineteen but far more bitter.
    “Easily,” she said. “Right now it’s no trick.”
    I fought to speak calmly. “What are you? A…a shape-changer? My God, I can hardly say it, a werewolf?”
    “I don’t