The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine Read Online Free PDF

this,” he said.
    “Me, neither.”
    “We’re really not supposed to be here,” he said, thinking of that other vast room down at the end of the corridor, and said to himself,
That’s what they call the “engine room”; we absolutely can’t even glance that way again, can’t, can’t, can’t; the “engines” would be way too much for us
.
    The mewing and skritching, which had momentarily fallen silent, started up again, and in the midst of what felt and tasted to him like panic, Ballard had a vision of a kitten trapped behind a piece of kitchen equipment. He stepped forward and leaned over to peer into the region beyond the long counter and beside the enormous range. Two funny striped cabinets about five feet tall stood there side by side.
    “Do you hear a cat?” he asked.
    “If you think that’s a cat …” Sandrine said, a bit farther behind him than she had been at first.
    The cabinets were cages, and what he had seen as stripes were their bars. “Oh,” Ballard said, and sounded as though he had been punched in the stomach.
    “Damn you, you’ve started to bleed through your suit jacket,” Sandrine whispered. “We have to get out of here, fast.”
    Ballard scarcely heard her. In any case, if he were bleeding, it was of no consequence. They knew what to do about bleeding. Here, on the other hand, perhaps sixty feet away in this preposterous “galley,” was a phenomenon he had never before witnessed. The first cage contained a thrashing beetlelike insect nearly too large for it. This gigantic insect was the source of the mewing and scratching. One of its mandibles rasped at a bar as the creature struggled to roll forward or back, producing noises of insect distress. Long smeary wounds in the wide middle area between its scrabbling legs oozed a yellow ichor.
    Horrified, Ballard looked hastily into the second cage, which he had thought empty but for a roll of blankets or towels or the like, and discovered that the blankets or towels were occupied by a small boy from one of the river tribes who was gazing at him through the bars. The boy’s eyes looked hopeless and dead. Half of his shoulder seemed to have been sliced away, and a long, thin strip of bone gleamed white against a great scoop of red. The arm half-extended through the bars concluded in a dark, messy stump.
    The boy opened his mouth and released, almost too softly to be heard, a single high-pitched musical note. Pure, accurate, well-defined, clearly a word charged with some deep emotion, the note hung in the air for a brief moment, underwent a briefer half-life, and was gone.
    “What’s that?” Sandrine said.
    “Let’s get out of here.”
    He pushed her through the door, raced around her, and began charging up the stairs. When they reached the top of the steps and threw themselves into the dining room, Ballard collapsed onto the floor, then rolled onto his back, heaving in great quantities of air. His chest rose and fell, and with every exhalation he moaned. A portion of his left side pulsing with pain felt warm and wet. Sandrine leaned against the wall, breathing heavily in a less convulsive way. After perhaps thirty seconds, she managed to say, “I trust that was a bird down there.”
    “Um. Yes.” He placed his hand on his chest, then held it up like a stop sign, indicating that he would soon have more to say. After a few more great heaving lungfuls of air, he said, “Toucan. In a big cage.”
    “You were that frightened by a kind of parrot?”
    He shook his head slowly from side to side on the polished floor. “I didn’t want them to catch us down there. It seemed dangerous, all of a sudden. Sorry.”
    “You’re bleeding all over the floor.”
    “Can you get me a new bandage pad?”
    Sandrine pushed herself off the wall and stepped toward him. From his perspective, she was as tall as a statue. Her eyes glittered. “Screw you, Ballard. I’m not your servant. You can come with me. It’s where we’re going anyhow.”
    He