Read Online North Wind by Gwyneth Jones - Free Book Online Page B

her lower belly. On her breastless torso there were two small dark marks. Sid drew in his breath, responding in spite of himself to a girl’s slight body, naked in shadow. He had stolen the swan princess’s plumage. She was his captive. She turned, and caught his eye.
    His fairy princess had the face of a child that has starved to death: black eye sockets, black nostril slits, lips shrunk so tight the outline of the teeth showed through.
     she asked calmly.
    “It doesn’t matter. They’re both the same.”
    Bella showed no interest whatsoever in Sid’s manly physique.
    In human clothes again, and slightly shaken by the undressing incident, Sid took out a compact. He smeared his fingers with gel and rubbed them through his hair; he smudged in brows and lashes with his fingertips, peering into the tiny mirror. He never used cosmetic drugs. They were too chancy. With gels you decided when it was going to wear off. Dark hair, sun-damaged skin. He was nondescript, if no one noticed his eyes.
    
    She was looking at the compact. Aleutians didn’t use mirrors. To them a reflection was a kind of natural deadworld phenomenon: it was creepy. He put the case away unhurriedly.
    “I don’t think we should go anywhere,” she announced, with trembling firmness. “We should stay here and wait.”
    “Oh? For whom?” Caught off balance, he snapped at her. “The rescue shuttle? I don’t think so. I think Uji has evacuated anyone who was going, and everyone else is dead. And I know as well as you do, the shipworld won’t send help. They won’t back up the Expedition, unless something much worse than this happens.”
    (His inner eye forced on him the scene in the main hall last night: what could be worse?)
    He saw from her face that he was right, or at least she believed the same. They were all dead, all of them. Grief, panic and chaos surged beneath the thin skin of his determination. It made him cruel. “But excuse me, what do I know? Maybe there are more Aleutians on earth, unbeknownst to the Expedition or the Government of the World. The brood’s an organic computer. I suppose you can write yourself in or out of the system if you know how, change your chemical handle so your own parent wouldn’t know you. I’ve heard about these Aleutian masters of disguise. Is it true? I’d dearly love to know.”
    
    “Oh, please, have no secrets from your native guide. I suppose they’re hunting for the instantaneous-travel device, the one Johnny and Braemar used to reach the shipworld? The occult secret of human science the Aleutians have been hunting for ever since?” He curled his lip. “Don’t tell me you believe in that.”
    
    Her puzzlement jolted him. She didn’t know what he was talking about, and he was going crazy. Get a grip, Sid!
    “Ridiculous, yes. I’m sorry I raised the subject. And we are leaving at sunset.”
    They went up the steps until they could see light, and waited for it to fade. Sid didn’t feel hungry, but his mouth was horribly parched. In the pipeline there was plenty of water. But you couldn’t get at it: it was locked in the slurry of the bacterial flow. He kept his anxiety to himself. Bella complained of neither hunger nor thirst.
    “Let’s go,” he said at last.
    She climbed slowly, a few steps at a time. The pale mandorla overhead, shaped like a woman’s sex or two hands folded in prayer, was filled with gold. Sid was carrying Bella’s shoes and the chador. It was good woolen cloth, and he guessed—not yet realizing the awful significance of this—that the invalid would find its weight a burden. He waited until she was beside him. Sid was not a tall man, but her head barely reached his collarbone. She glanced up, questioning: why had he stopped? He touched the scarf he’d wrapped around her starved-child face.
    “You’re going into a different world,” he said. “You have to