Read Online Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero, Lilit Zekulin Thwaites - Free Book Online

gaias for the book, and downloaded the text onto her electronic tablet. She planned to just glance through it, but she began to read and couldn’t stop. It was a short, unsettling novel, the story of a boy who lived in one of the Zero Air Zones. Bruna had been in one of those supercontaminated, marginal sectors during her time in the military, and she had to admit that the author knew how to convey the desperate and poisonous atmosphere of those wretched holes. What happened was that the boy became friends with the recently arrived adolescent daughter of a judge. Magistrates, like doctors, police, and other socially necessary professionals, were posted to the Dirty Air Sectors on double salary, and for no longer than a year, to prevent any health repercussions. Bruna knew that even under those conditions, many refused to go. The novel told the story of the relationship between the two youths during those twelve months. At the end of that time, the night before the judge and her family were to leave, the two adolescents killed her with a hammer. The scene was brutal, but the novel was written in a way that was so convincing, so true to life, and so distressing that Bruna experienced a genuine complicity with the killers and wanted them to escape justice. Which they didn’t, so the end of the story was depressing.
    Bruna switched off the tablet. She was numb from having spent several hours in the same position and had the strangestfeeling of grief. There was something in that damn novel that seemed to have spoken directly to her. Something strangely close to home, recognizable. Something bordering on the unbearable.
Four years, three months, and twenty-three days.
    She leaped up and paced back and forth feverishly. The apartment had only two rooms: a lounge-kitchen, and a bedroom. Neither of them was very big, so two strides took her to a wall, and she had to turn around. She looked through the picture-window; the city shimmered and hummed in the dark. She approached the large jigsaw puzzle board: she’d been doing the puzzle on it for more than two months, but there was still a central hole of about a hundred pieces to be filled. It was one of the hardest puzzles she’d ever undertaken: an image of the universe, with a great deal of blackness, and few celestial bodies from which to get her bearings. She looked at the jagged edges of the hole for a moment and fiddled with the loose pieces, trying to find one that would fit. Hidden order within chaos. Usually when she was solving jigsaw puzzles, she felt closer to serenity than at any other moment in her edgy life, but right now she couldn’t concentrate, and she ended up abandoning the puzzle without having managed to place a single piece. It was Nopal’s fault, she thought, and the fault of that revolting novel that had hit so close to home. Those damn memorists were all equally perverse, equally repugnant. And then, as on so many other occasions when anxiety was exploding inside her body, Bruna decided to go for a run—physical tiredness was the best tranquilizer. She put on an old pair of track pants and sneakers, and left the apartment. When she hit the street, it was midnight on the dot.
    She shot off so fast in the direction of the park that she quickly ran out of breath. She reduced her pace and tried to find a well-balanced rhythm, breathing easily, accommodating her body. Little by little she got into the relaxed and hypnotic rhythm of a good run, her feet almost weightless, hitting the sidewalk in time to her heartbeat. Above her head, the public screens spilledout the usual stupid messages, juvenile little quips, music clips, personal images from someone’s last holiday, or news items covered by amateur journalists. In one news item, she saw an Instant Terrorist blowing himself up on Gran Vía, fortunately causing only his own death. Just as well that at this stage, Ins were so incompetent and clumsy that they rarely managed to do much damage, thought the