Spirits in the Wires Read Online Free PDF Page B

ever—”
    â€œI already am,” I said and shut the door in his face, engaged the lock.
    I cried for a long time after he was gone. It wasn’t because of what had happened with him—or at least not
only
because of that. Mostly it was because I felt so bereft and alone, abandoned in this unfair world where my only intimate human contact so far had been with such a sorry excuse of a loser. Now that the happy blush of just being accepted for once had been swept away, I realized that he was completely self-centered. He was full of words, but empty of anything meaningful. Our evening together had been for him, not for me, or even to be with me.
    If Aaran Goldstein was an example of what it meant to be human, I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to be one anymore.
    I had my flying dream again that night, soaring over an endless landscape of circuit boards, their vast expanse cut with rivers of cruel electricity. …
    I had gained some useful experience from my evening with Aaran, but otherwise not a lot had changed. Everything was still new and fresh. I knew what things were—and if I didn’t, the voice in my head could give me its history—but not how they tasted, or felt, or sounded. Not how their essence reverberated under my skin.
    I didn’t stay away from readings or openings or clubs after that—I was too stubborn to give Aaran that small victory—but I didn’t look to find acceptance or kindness at them anymore, and didn’t find it either. Turns out, what honest friendships I came to make, I made on the street.
    There was Marc, of course. I’d see him from time to time, always in some different doorway, panhandling on a street corner, dozing on a park bench. He carried a constant undercurrent of bitterness inside him— directed at what he saw as his own personal failures, as much as at the uncaring world he was in, a world that had no time or place for those such as himself who, for one reason or another, had fallen through the cracks.
    But most of the time, he kept that bitterness locked behind a cheerful front. I think what he liked best about me was that, no matter which face he showed me, I accepted him as he was and made no judgments. I also didn’t hand out advice, or try to change him. I’d just buy him a meal or a coffee, and share it with him as though we were simply friends out to enjoy each other’s company.
    Charity didn’t enter into it. He knew I’d give him a place to stay, or money, if he asked. But he didn’t. And I didn’t offer.
    Then there was the woman that everyone called Malicorne whom I met on the edge of the Tombs one day, that part of the city that the citizens have abandoned, leaving I don’t know how many blocks of empty lots, rubble-choked streets and fallen-down, deserted buildings. Factories, tenements, stores. The only legally-inhabited building was the old county jail, an imposing stone structure that stood on the western border of the Tombs, overlooking the Kickaha River, just north of the corner of Lee and Mac-Neil, but you couldn’t call what the prisoners in there did as living. They were just marking time.
    Malicorne was tall and horsy-faced, her eyes so dark they seemed to be all pupil. Her long chestnut hair was thick and matted, hanging past her shoulders like dreadlocks. But the thing about her—the strange thing, I mean—is how she had this white horn curling up into a point coming right out of the middle of her forehead. Now that’s unusual enough, but even stranger is how nobody really seems to notice it.
    â€œPeople don’t pay attention to things that don’t make sense to them,” she said when I asked her about it.
    Now I had a maybe strange origin, if my dreams and the voice in my head were anything to go by. She had one for certain. So why didn’t people treat her the way they treated me?
    She laughed. “Look at me,” she said. “I’m