Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

right would...unless she took great care to hide it from her. And even so, Anna was hard to fool. Almost nothing slipped past her watchful eyes.

“We’re freezing back here, Krupin,” said the thin, dour man seated to her left. “Can’t you do anything about it?”

Krupin nodded toward his dashboard vents. The woeful heater was clanking away. “It’s already on high,” he said. “This is the best I can manage, ser.”

The man scowled and crossed his legs under the flaps of his dark, knee-length overcoat. His name was Urban, and Natasha didn’t like him at all. His aloof manner was part of it. But her feelings went deeper than that. The muddy brownish-red colors that clung to him smelled like burning tires. They stung her eyes and nose and left a strong, unpleasant taste in her mouth.

Still, she would not have argued about the cold. Her lips were stiff, her cheeks almost numb.

The plump old woman sitting to her right noticed her discomfort, frowned and pulled off her shawl. Thick wool with large tassels at the ends, it had been knitted with an expert hand.

“You should wear this.” She spoke with a heavy foreign accent, wrapping the shawl around Natasha’s shoulders. “I have more meat on my bones than you.”

“Danke schön,” Natasha said with genuine gratitude. “Ich fühle mich besser.”

Anna blinked. She regarded the girl for a long, silent moment. “Ich wusste nicht sie Deutsch sprach?”

“Deutsche? Ist das was Sie am Telefon sprechen.”

Anna kept looking at her. Natasha thought she seemed mystified.

In fact, she was utterly astonished. The child claimed not to know what language she had spoken. And had suggested she picked it up after hearing her talk on the phone.

It was extraordinary...and a little unsettling. Moscow Center had conferenced with Anna a handful of times since her assignment to the detdom, insisting they speak in her native German to confound potential eavesdroppers. But she had said little within earshot of the girl. Certainly not enough for Natasha to hear more than a smattering of words and phrases.

Yet she had spoken just now in functional, perfectly grammatical German sentences. Anna could only wonder what sort of left-temporal-lobe development she would need in order to extrapolate that level of fluency from overheard conversations.

She caught Urban’s inquisitive glance and ignored it. She was neither his friend nor his confidant. It would do no good for Natasha to view them as a unit.

The 4X4 wound through the mountains for another half mile and then nosed downhill. Anna’s stomach plunged, but the weather immediately began to improve with their descent. Although the vehicle continued to rock in the powerful gusts, the snow around it had lightened and ceased to blow horizontally against the windshield.

“We’re entering the valley,” Krupin said up-front. “It shouldn’t be long from here.”

Bundled in the shawl, Natasha sensed Anna’s relief. She wished she could have felt the same.

The sun sank below the craggy horizon as Krupin made his slow descent from the hills, taking a straight, narrow road across the valley floor. Outside, the wind snorted and thrashed against the windows like a raging bear. Its unabated ferocity made the Lada’s adult passengers grow tense.

Natasha sat quietly, facing forward. She saw the countryside shimmering through a haze of fine, powdery snow. Saw the ice-sheathed pine boughs around them glow purple, blue, and gold. The auras flowed together in iridescent waves, shifting and merging and then separating again like fresh watercolors on paper. She had grown up surrounded by the forest and often felt the trees, especially old ones, spoke to each other in colors. Limb to limb, branch to branch, root to root.

The Lada rumbled along the bottom of the valley. The snowflakes fell in spurts, dancing, swirling, and corkscrewing in the twilight. Their rainbow hues reminded Natasha of butterfly wings as they fluttered to the ground.

She abruptly thought of her father again. When she first experienced the Glowing, it had confused and upset her. But Papa was always quick to ease her fears. Placing her on his lap, he would rock her and sing in a soft, gentle voice until she grew relaxed.

Butterfly, butterfly, she flew into the flowers,

On a white branch she quietly touched down,

Our little boy, he caught her by the wings

Then placed her in a glass jar, round...

“Such a pretty tune.” Anna was smiling at her. “Where you did you learn it?”

Natasha looked at her, confused. After a second, she realized she’d been humming to herself.

She straightened up in the seat. The lullaby was all she had left of her father. The only thing that filled her emptiness. She dreaded sharing anything about it. To do that was to risk someone taking it from her.

“It’s just a song,” she lied. “That’s all.”

Anna nodded, her eyes on the girl’s face.

“Songs are wonderful things,” she said. “I wonder what it is called.”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh? And if you could give it a name, any name, what would it be? Can you tell me?”

Natasha’s only response was a shrug. Most of the time, Anna’s kindness seemed real and her colors tasted of peaches. Back at the home, she had shown none of the other case workers’ outright cruelty toward the other boys and girls. But she was also mostly uninvolved with them, indifferent, reserving most of her attention for Natasha.

She hadn’t quite known how to feel about that. It seemed people had many sides. So many, she thought, they acted like entirely different people in different situations. There had been occasions when Anna’s colors flashed ice blue and left a cold, metallic taste on the back of her tongue. When it seemed as if Anna was studying her, as if she was an animal in the zoo.

Natasha felt that now. And it angered her.

“I wouldn’t give it a name,” she said defensively. Because none could be finer than its real one.

Anna sat regarding her for a long minute. Then she smiled.

“It’s been a long ride, and I’ve bothered you with one too many questions,” she said. “You must be exhausted.”

Natasha said