Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 Read Online Free PDF

bouillabaisse, too.”
    Genie turned to face her sister as Leah came into the room, checkered skirt flipping around her knees, transiently lovely as girls on the edge of adolescence can be. “Leah, what's jambalaya?”
    “Like rice and stuff?” Leah glanced at Elspeth for confirmation, tossing her carryall at the bench in the corner. She was already almost as tall as the older woman. “Can I have a—. Oh, thanks.” She giggled and dragged a stool beside Genie's as Elspeth slid the second plate across the bar. “Have you talked to Dad?”
    “Just an hour or so ago. He and Jenny are safe on the ship. He gave me coordinates. We can look up tonight with the telescope and see it.” Elspeth dialed coffee on the tap and fixed herself a cup before walking around the counter to sit beside the girls.
I need to bring some tea over,
she thought, and grinned privately.
If Gabe's going to come home to my toothbrush and towels, I guess a few things in the kitchen cabinet won't hurt
.
    Typical. Wait till the boy is seventy, eighty vertical miles away to move in.
“What do you two want to do after homework?”
    “I've got flight simulation,” Leah said. “At six, at the lab.” She sighed, absently touching the shiny interface hidden under her streaked wheat-straw hair. “It's so weird being at the office with Dad gone.”
    Elspeth leaned her elbows on the sealed and brushed concrete breakfast bar. “Have you found out when you're supposed to go up to Clarke? Any of your group of trainee pilots?”
    Genie poked Leah. Leah caught her sister's hand and pressed it against her side, finishing her sandwich with the other hand. “Ellie, I don't know if they're even planning on taking us up. Training and simulations, and flying the mock starship here and there and mostly into planets. But they won't tell us if we're ever going up or not. Or even which of us are getting picked for the enhancements. There's like a hundred candidates, and I've only met the thirty or so in my class.”
    “You will be,” Elspeth said, turning her mug on her fingertips, hiding her worry. Leah had already had the much less invasive surgery to ready her body for a neural virtual reality hookup. The nanosurgeons that produced the augmented reflexes and senses of a starship pilot were much more dangerous—derived from the same alien tech as the
Montreal
's faster-than-light drive—and the process was very poorly understood. “They'll need all of you trained eventually. I expect they'll have Jenny teach you. She used to be a drill instructor.”
    “I know,” Leah said, and let Genie's hand fall. “I miss Richard, Ellie.”
    “I know,” Elspeth twisted her fingers together, feeling the uselessness of someone relegated to observerhood, someone whose work is done. “I miss him, too.”
     
    12:34 AM

Saturday 4 November, 2062

Bloor Street

Toronto, Ontario
    I should go home,
Elspeth thought, shutting Genie's bedroom door.
It beats sleeping on the sofa
. She crossed the living room, past the small telescope they'd just brought back down from the roof, and ran a hand over tan tweed. Leah was almost fourteen, after all. And responsible for her age. And Elspeth was only a message away.
    Half absently, Elspeth walked around the end table. Back down the hall past the girls' rooms, to the door standing ajar at the end. She laid a finger against it and let it drift open, creaking softly. “Lights up,” she said under her breath.
    The bed was unmade, Gabe's robe thrown across the blue down comforter. Clothes draped pegs and chairbacks, and Elspeth smiled around a sting. “Screw it,” she whispered. “Lights down.” The head of the bed was below the window. She climbed up on it and leaned against the headboard, breasts on her arms, forehead warm against the glass. Outside, for once, no rain was falling, and the Toronto night glistened. She imagined she heard the creak of autumn branch on branch in a fickle wind. There would be frost by morning. Her