Skin Read Online Free PDF

apparently a
private gym in there. No one moved in or out, there was none of the
usual sounds of weights being dropped or the pulse of bass from
loud music.
    I was thirteen
years old when I came to Guessing for the first time. My mother had
a show on in the big arena that still stands down by the Central
Station. On the morning of the big fight, she gave me fifty bucks,
a ten ride ticket for the bus and her good wishes to get out and
see the city. A thirteen year old kid let lose alone in a city like
this, even then I knew it wasn’t cool. I spent the whole day riding
the buses as far as they’d let me go and then swiping my ticket
again to get another hour of not having to walk around the streets
alone.
    When the last
ticket ran out and I’d hit the end of the route, I was in Downtown
not far from where I stood waiting for the strange woman with the
snake’s eyes to let me into the blank building. It was late in the
afternoon then too. The sun was sinking. The horizons in a city are
right in front of your face so the shadows were already long and
dark. I’d spent five of my fifty dollars on a Coke, something my
mother would have come down on me for in an instant as if I’d
bought crack, and I leaned against a bill clad wall, trying to look
like I was meant to be in this place.
    You don’t grow
up in the Sprawl without hearing stories about what happens in
Guessing. About what lurks on the streets where I was standing,
eyes darting, and clutching the Coke bottle so hard that the
plastic crimped. Even then I could feel the real down of the
Downtown, the underground, the places behind the streets and the
bright twenty four hour snack shops, the bars, the Cineplexes, the
places that flashed the neon XXX signs even in the day. I could
feel Guessing was there, waiting for this weedy kid to look in the
wrong way at the wrong time and she’d nab me in her neon and
concrete claws and take me down to that beneath place.
    I had that
same feeling standing against the black glass trying to look like I
was meant to be there, like I knew what I was doing, like I
belonged and wasn’t nervous. I didn’t have a plastic bottle to grip
onto, but my hands balled, jammed in my pockets, my nails pressing
too hard into my palms.
    Just when I
was about to leave, thinking I had the wrong building or, more
likely, that I’d been stooged or imagined this whole thing as some
hallucination brought on my head trauma, a narrow door opened and
Simone, the red haired maid I’d met the day before, poked her head
around the corner.
    “ She
said you can come in now.”
    I moved
inside.
    I stepped into
a small foyer, face to face with twin silver elevator doors. The
air was cool and smelled vaguely of lemon perfume. Simone pressed
the buttons for both lifts. The doors slid open smoothly with a
soft ping. She pointed to the one on the left.
    “ That
one’s down,” she said and stepped into the one on the right. The
doors closed and I was alone with nothing else to do but keep on
going.
    There were only
two choices in the lift, up or down, and no indication of floor
numbers or where I was heading. After a quick ride of what seemed
like three or four floors, I stepped into the mystery underground.
My hands still shoved in my pockets, my jaw clenched.
    A frosted glass
door and a high tech key pad; a series of numbered buttons and what
looked like a camera lens. I tried a few numbers at random. Nothing
happened as I had expected.
    “ Hello?”
I called, pressing my eye close to the lens. “What happens
now?”
    The door
clicked and moved to open just a gap. I pulled it open wide. My
mouth dropped.
    I stepped into
a cavernous space, a place that looked like it might have been made
especially for me and me alone. The room was softly lit by lights
that twinkled from the high ceiling like stars. A glass panel was
set into the ceiling. A stained glass pattern, the same symbol I
had seen in Sveta’s home of the wing, paw human hand wrapped around
the old