Clade Read Online Free Page B

ascot, and a disheveled
viejo
who’s dozing, his silver hair mashed against the window. Ten minutes after the pod slots onto the fast-moving maglev, it slots off at the Cannery Row substation. From there, it’s a quick stroll to Salmon Ella’s. From outside, the place has been styled to mimic a corrugated sheet-metal warehouse. Inside, a labyrinth of rice paper partitions grid out around renovated conveyor belts, overhead spray nozzles, rinsing troughs, and other antiquated fish processing equipment. Basically, it’s a cross between a museum, an old sardine factory, and a Tokyo teahouse. Open grills line one wall, barbecuing farm-bred salmon steaks and fillets.
    Rigo slinks into the appropriate cubicle, which is unoccupied, and sits at a black lacquered table under colorful paper lanterns. The lanterns are round, cylindrical, or square, and decorated with flowers, mountains, or other natural scenery. They dangle from the metal ceiling joists on invisible monomol filaments that make it look as if they are floating in place. Soon, a waitperson stops by. Rigo orders a Corona, sips, feels himself sliding into a melancholy funk that’s in danger of becoming a nasty brood. The music, some kind of European techno-Goth he normally wouldn’t mind, doesn’t help.
    When he’s thoroughly depressed, an old woman approaches the table and slides in to the seat across from him.
    “I feel like a castle in a corner,” Varda says.
    Rigo offlines the IA. Chess has never been one of his fortes.
    “Thank you for coming,” the woman says, all polite, as if they’re having crumpets and tea. She’s wearing a silver lamé skirt the size of a parachute, a purple long-sleeved blouse that covers her arms, and about twenty kilos of African beads in the form of necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. Her face doesn’t look old—but he can see it in her shrunken blue eyes, the way they’ve retreated from the world. She smiles, thin lips the color and texture of vulcanized rubber. Up close, her movements are jerky. In addition to surgically smooth flesh she has nanimatronic grafts, a mesh exoskeleton that damps the tremors in her muscles. She’s a prisoner, dying by degrees in her chain-mail cage.
    “Can I get you anything?” she asks.
    “Just what I came for.” He picks up the folded napkin from his lap, wipes his mouth, then rests his hand with the crumpled cloth on the table.
    The woman digs in her purse, pulls out a transfer card, and sets it on the table in front of them.
    “It’s in the napkin,” Rigo tells her. He removes his hand, reaches for the card a few centimeters away.
    Just as he’s sliding the plastic toward him, her fingers, dry, cool, and plaintive, touch his. “Wait,” she says.
    Rigo makes a show of glancing at his wristwatch. The point being that he has to be someplace else soon. He’d like to indulge her, but . . .
    “I’ll make it worth your while,” she says.
    For a second Rigo wonders if he’s misheard. But her fingers have curled tight around the back of his hand and wrist, like the jaws of a Venus’s-flytrap clamping shut to digest him.
    “Why?” he asks, thinking to humiliate her—that maybe shame will disengage her hand. Scald her.
    “What difference does it make?”
    Her eyes are reptilian. Rigo can read nothing behind her watery pupils, slitted with purpose. She’s incomprehensible—a total fucking alien. What does she expect from him? Pity? Sympathy?
    “Is it contagious?” Rigo asks, wondering if he can trust her to tell the truth.
    “No.”
    “I’m not a Necrofeel,” he says, indignant.
    She doesn’t so much as blink at the insult. She’s beyond anger, it seems. Beyond shame. “I’m not dead.”
    Yet,
Rigo thinks, finishing the unspoken end of the sentence, the part that she refuses to admit. She wants him to make her feel alive, to stand in the way of death like a human sacrifice.
    “I’m sorry,” Rigo says. “I can’t help you.” His vitriol has suddenly dried up,