HUMBLEDRUM 3 страница

“I am a naiad. I cannot leave the stream. ” By her voice she could have been in junior high. Her eyes met Quentin’s.

“Your magic is clumsy, ” she added.

It was electrifying. Quentin saw now that she wasn’t human, her fingers and toes were webbed. To his left he heard a shuffling noise. It was Penny. He was getting down on his knees on the snowy bank.

“We humbly apologize, ” he said, head bowed. “We most humbly seek your pardon. ”

“Jesus Christ! ” Josh stage-whispered. “Dork! ”

The hovering nymph shifted her attention. Stream water rilled down her bare skin. She tilted her head girlishly.

“You admire my beauty, human? ” she asked Penny. “I am cold. Would you warm me with your burning skin? ”

“Please, ” Penny went on, blushing furiously. “If you have a quest to bestow upon us, we would gladly undertake it. We would gladly—”

Mercifully Janet cut him off.

“We’re visitors from Earth, ” she said firmly. “Is there a city around here that you could direct us to? Maybe Castle Whitespire? ”

“—we would gladly undertake to do your bidding, ” Penny finished.

“Do you serve the rams? ” Alice asked.

“I serve no false gods, human girl. Or goddesses. I serve the river, and the river serves me. ”

“Are there other humans here? ” Ana& #239; s said. “Like us? ”

“Like you? ” The nymph smiled saucily, and the tip of a startling blue tongue appeared for an instant between her rather sharp-looking front teeth. “Oh, no. Not like you. None so cursed! ”

At that moment Quentin felt his telekinetic spell cease to exist. She’d abolished it, though he didn’t catch how, without a word or a gesture. In the same instant the naiad flipped head down and dived, her pale periwinkle buttocks flashing in the air, and vanished into dark water that looked too shallow to contain her.

Her head poked up again a moment later.

“I fear for you here, human children. This is not your war. ”

“We’re not children, ” Janet said.

“What war? ” Quentin called.

She smiled again. Between her lavender lips her teeth were pointy and interlocking like a fighting fish’s. She held something dripping in her webbed fist.

“A gift from the river. Use it when all hope is lost. ”

She tossed it at them overhand. Quentin caught it one-handed; he was relieved out of all proportion to its actual importance that he didn’t bobble it. Thank God for his old juggling reflexes. When he looked up again, the nymph was gone. They were alone with the chattering brook.

Quentin was holding a small ivory horn chased with silver.

“Oh-kay! ” Josh shouted. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “We are definitely not in Kansas anymore! ”

The others gathered around to look at the horn. Quentin handed it to Eliot, who turned it over a few times, peered into one end, then the other.

“I don’t feel anything on it at all, ” Eliot said. “Looks like something you’d buy in an airport gift shop. ”

“You wouldn’t necessarily feel it, ” Penny said proprietarily. He took it and stowed the horn in his pack.

“We should have asked her if this is Fillory, ” Alice said quietly.

“Of course it’s Fillory, ” Penny said.

“I’d like to be sure. And I’d like to know why we’re cursed. ”

“And what’s this war? ” Richard asked, his heavy brows knotted. “This raises a lot of questions. ”

“And I didn’t like those teeth, ” Alice added.

“Jesus, ” Josh said. “Jesus! That was a naiad, people! We just saw a river nymph! How cool is that? How cool are we? Huh? Fuckin’ Fillory, people! ”

He grabbed Quentin’s shoulders and shook him. He ran at Richard and made him bump chests.

“Can I just say that she was pretty hot? ” said Janet.

“Shyeah! I’ll take that over a faun any day, ” Josh said. Ana& #239; s swatted him.

“Hey, that’s Penny’s girlfriend you’re talking about, ” Janet said. “Show some respect. ”

The tension faded, and for a minute they all chattered among themselves, giving one another shit and just geeking out on the sheer alien magic of it all. Was she corporeal? Did she become fluid once she entered the stream? How else could she submerge herself in such shallow water? And how had she canceled Quentin’s spell? What was her function in the magical ecosystem? And what about the horn? Alice was already paging through her worn Fillory paperbacks for references to it—didn’t Martin find a magic horn in the first book. . . ?

After a while it began to sink in that they’d been outside for forty-five minutes in deep winter wearing nothing but jeans and sweaters. Even Janet admitted it was time to head back to the City. Eliot corralled the stragglers and chatterers, and they all linked hands on the bank of the stream.

They stood in a circle, still a little giddy, and for a moment happy conspiratorial glances flew between them. There was some bad personal stuff going down, but that didn’t have to ruin everything, did it? They were doing something really important here. This was what every one of them had been waiting for, looking for, their whole lives—what they were meant to do! They’d found the magic door, the secret path through the hidden garden. They’d gotten ahold of something new, a real adventure, and it was only just beginning.

It was in that hush that they heard it for the first time—a dry, rhythmic ticking sound. It was almost lost in the twittering of the brook, but it grew louder and more distinct. One by one they stopped talking to listen. It was snowing more heavily now.

Out of context it was hard to place. Alice was the first to twig.

“It’s a clock, ” she said. “That’s a clock ticking. ”

She searched their faces impatiently.

“A clock, ” she repeated, panicky now. “Watcherwoman, that’s the Watcherwoman! ”

Penny fumbled hastily for the button. The tick-tock grew even louder, like a monstrous heart beating, right on top of them, but it was impossible to tell what direction it was coming from. And then it didn’t matter, because they were floating up through cold, clear water to safety.

This time it was all business. Back in the City they gathered up the cold-weather gear—all except for Janet, who lay limply on the ground doing yoga breathing—and then got back in the fountain, where they linked hands along the edge with what was becoming practiced ease. Janet found the strength to make a joke about Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita. They nodded once all around and slipped back in in unison.

They were in Fillory again, set down by the stream they’d just left, but the snow was gone. It was an early fall day now, the air full of lukewarm mist. The temperature felt like high sixties. It was like time-lapse photography: the branches of trees that had been bare five minutes ago now swarmed with turning leaves. One golden leaf floated tinily, impossibly high in the gray sky on some fluky updraft. The grass was littered with glassy puddles from a torrential autumn rain that must have ended only minutes earlier. They stood around in the mild air, hugging their bundles of parkas and woolly gloves and feeling foolish.

“Overdressed again, ” Eliot said. He dropped his bundle in disgust. “Story of my life. ”

No one could think of a reasonable alternative to just leaving the winter gear lying there on the wet grass. They could have gone back to the Neitherlands to store it, but then it might have been winter all over again when they got back. It seemed ridiculous, a bug in the system, but it didn’t matter, they were energized now. They filled their canteens from the stream.

A bridge spanned the creek fifty yards downstream, a gentle arch made of intricate, curly Fillorian ironwork. Quentin was sure it couldn’t have been there before, but Richard insisted they just hadn’t seen it through the snow-laden branches. Quentin looked at the flowing, burbling water. There was no sign of the nymph. How much time had passed since they were last here? he wondered. Seasons in Fillory could last a century. Or had they gone back in time? Was this the same adventure, or were they starting a new one?

On the far side of the bridge there was a wide, neat path through the forest, dusted with leaves and pine needles but definitely a path in good standing this time, an official path. They made good time, their spirits buoyed up by the perfect weather and a constant, low-level adrenaline drip. It was really on now. No more false starts. It wasn’t that Fillory could wipe out what happened last night—but maybe it could, for all he knew. Anything could happen here. A brown deer ambled out of the forest and walked ahead of them for a stretch, looking back over its shoulder with an air of genuinely exceptional intelligence, they all agreed, but if it could speak it declined to address them. They tried to follow it—maybe it was leading them somewhere? was it a messenger from Ember and Umber? —but it bounded away exactly the way an ordinary non-magical deer would have.

Josh practiced a spell that uncurled Ana& #239; s’s hair from a distance. She kept looking around, annoyed but unable to pinpoint the source. Janet linked arms with Quentin and Eliot and made them do a “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” skipping dance. He couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think Eliot had had a drink all day. When was the last time that had happened?

The forest seemed to go on forever. Once in a while the sun appeared long enough to shoot some long, dusty beams down between the trees, then disappeared again.

“This is right, ” Penny said, looking around. His eyes were glazed. He had entered a daze of ecstatic certainty. “This feels right to me. We’re supposed to be here. ”

Janet rolled her eyes.

“What do you think, Q? ” Penny said. “Doesn’t this feel right to you? ”

Without knowing how it happened Quentin had Penny’s ratty T-shirt bunched in his fists. Penny weighed more than he’d counted on, but Quentin still managed to get him off balance and push him backward until his head clunked against the damp trunk of a pine tree.

“Never speak to me, ” Quentin said evenly. “Do you understand? You do not address me directly, ever. You do not speak to me. ”

“I don’t want to fight you, ” Penny said. “That’s exactly what the Watcherwoman wants—”

“Did you not just hear what I said? ” Quentin clunked Penny’s head against the tree again, hard this time. Somebody said his name. “You lardy little fucking nub? Did you not just fucking hear what I fucking said? Was I unclear in any way? ”

He walked away without waiting for an answer. Fillory had better give him something to fight soon or he was going to lose it completely.

The novelty of actually, physically being in Fillory was wearing thin. In spite of everything a mood of general grumpiness was growing, a spoiled-picnic mood. Every time a bird perched overhead for more than a few seconds Josh would say, “Okay, this is the one, ” or “I think it’s trying to tell us something, ” or eventually, “Hey asshole, fly away from me, please. Okay, thanks. ”

“At least the Watcherwoman hasn’t shown up, ” Eliot said.

“If that even was the Watcherwoman before, ” Josh said. “Supposedly they got her in the first book, right? So. ”

“Yeah, I know. ” Eliot had a handful of acorns and was chucking them at trees as they walked. “But something’s a little off here. I don’t understand why that nymph wasn’t boring us about Ember and Umber. They’re always so pushy about Them in the books. ”

“If there’s a war between the rams and the Watcherwoman still going on, we’re going to want to get with Ember and Umber stat, ” Alice said.

“Oh, yeah, ” Janet said. She made quotey-fingers. “ ‘Stat. ’ ”

“If They want us on Their side, They will find us, ” Penny intoned. “We need have no fear on that score. ”

No one answered him. It was becoming increasingly clear that Penny’s encounter with the nymph had put him in an altered state. That was how he was dealing with Fillory. He’d undergone a conversion experience, flipped into full-on Renaissance Faire role-playing mode.

“Watch it, watch it! ” Richard yelled. They registered the drumming thuds of hooves on soft earth almost too late. A carriage drawn by two horses tore past them at a full gallop, scattering them into the trees on either side of the road. The carriage was closed and dark; on its side it bore what looked like a coat of arms that had recently been painted over in black.

The coachman was bundled up in a black cloak. He—she? it was impossible to tell—signaled the horses to slow to a walk, then a stop, a hundred feet ahead of them down the road.

“The thick plottens, ” Eliot said dryly.

It was about damn time something happened. Quentin, Janet, and Ana& #239; s walked boldly toward it, all competing to be the reckless one, the hero, the one who pushed things forward. In his present state of mind Quentin felt fully prepared to go right up and knock on the shutters, but he found himself pulling up a few yards away. So did the others. The black coach did look ominously funereal.

A muffled voice spoke from inside the carriage.

“Do they bear the Horns? ”

This was evidently directed not at them but at the coachman, who had the better vantage point. If the coachman replied, he/she did so inaudibly.

“Do you bear the horns? ” This voice was louder and clearer.

The advance party exchanged looks.

“What do you mean, Horns? ” Janet called. “We’re not from around here. ”

This was ridiculous. It was like talking to the Once-ler in Dr. Seuss.

“Do you serve the Bull? ” Now the voice sounded shriller to his ears, with high, twittering overtones.

“Who’s the bull? ” Quentin said, loudly and slowly, as if he were talking to somebody who didn’t speak English or was mildly retarded. There was no bull in the Plover books, so—? “We are visitors to your land. We do not serve the bull, or anybody else for that matter. ”

“They’re not deaf, Quentin, ” Janet said.

Long silence. One of the horses—they were black, too, as was the tackle, and everything else—whickered. The first voice said something inaudible.

“What? ” Quentin took a step closer.

A trapdoor banged open on top of the carriage. The sound was like a gunshot. A tiny expressionless head and a long green insect torso popped up out of it—it could only have been a praying mantis, but grown grotesquely to human size. It was so skinny and it had so many long emerald-colored legs and graceful whip antennae that at first Quentin didn’t notice that it was holding a green bow with a green arrow nocked.

“Shit! ” Quentin yelped reflexively. His voice cracked. It was close range, and there was no time to run. He cringed violently and fell down.

The horses took off like a shot the moment the mantis released. The trapdoor banged shut again. Dust and twigs spun up into the air in the carriage’s wake, its four big wheels fitting neatly in the ruts in the road.

When Quentin dared to look up again, Penny was standing over him. He held the arrow in one hand. He must have used a spell to speed up his reflexes, Fillorian Circumstances be damned, then plucked it out of the air in midflight. It would have neatly speared Quentin’s kidney.

The others came straggling up to watch the carriage recede into the distance.

“Wait, ” Josh said sarcastically. “Stop. ”

“Jesus, Penny, ” Janet breathed. “Nice catch. ”

What, was she going to fuck him now? Quentin thought. He stared at the arrow in Penny’s hand, panting. It was a yard long and fletched in black and yellow like a hornet. The tip had two angry curly steel barbs welded to it. He hadn’t even had time to panic.

He took a shaky breath.

“That all you got? ” he yelled after the dwindling carriage, too late for it to be funny.

Slowly he got to his feet. His knees were water and wouldn’t stop shaking.

Penny turned and, in an odd gesture, offered him the arrow. Quentin snorted angrily and walked away, slapping leaf junk off his hands. He didn’t want Penny to see him trembling. It probably would have missed anyway.

“Wow, ” Janet said. “That was one angry bug. ”

The day wore on. Light was leaking out of the sky, and the fun was leaking out of the afternoon. Nobody wanted to admit they were frightened, so they took the only other option, which was to be irritable instead. If they didn’t go back soon, they’d have to find somewhere to make camp for the night in the woods, which maybe wasn’t such a good idea if they were going to get shot at by giant bugs. None of them had enough medical magic to handle a barbed shaft to the small intestine. They stood and argued on the dirt road. Should they go back to Buffalo, maybe pick up some Kevlar after all? There were only so many arrows Penny could catch. Would Kevlar even stop an arrow?

And what kind of political situation were they walking into here? Bugs and bulls, nymphs and witches—who were the good guys and who were the bad guys? Everything was much less entertaining and more difficult to organize than they’d counted on. Quentin’s nerves were thoroughly jangled, and he kept touching the place on his stomach under his sweater where the arrow would have gone in. What, was it mammals vs. insects now? But then why would a praying mantis be fighting for a bull? The nymph had said this wasn’t their war. Maybe she had a point.

Quentin’s feet were killing him breaking in his brand-new hiking boots. He’d never dried off the foot he’d soaked in the stream before, and now it felt hot and blistered and mildewy. He imagined painful fungal spores taking root and flourishing in the warm wetness between his toes. He wondered how far they’d walked. It had been about thirty hours since he’d slept.

Both Penny and Ana& #239; s were adamantly against turning back. What if the Chatwins had turned back? Penny said. They were part of a story now. Had anybody actually ever read a story? This was the hump, the hard part, the part they’d be rewarded for later. You just had to get through it. And not to go on, but who are the good guys here? We are the good guys. And the good guys always survive.

“Wake up! ” Alice said. “This isn’t a story! It’s just one fucking thing after another! Somebody could have died back there! ” She obviously meant Quentin but didn’t want to say his name.

“Maybe Helen Chatwin was right, ” Richard said. “Maybe we’re not supposed to be here. ”

“You don’t get it, do you? ” Janet stared them down. “It’s supposed to be confusing at the beginning. The situation will get explained in time. We just have to keep moving. Keep picking up clues. If we leave now and come back it’ll be like five hundred years from now and we’ll have to start all over again. ”

Quentin looked from one to the other of them: Alice smart and skeptical, Janet all action and thoughtless exuberance. He turned to Ana& #239; s to ask her how far she thought they’d walked, on the vague theory that a European person might have a more accurate sense of these things than a bunch of Americans, when he realized he was the only one of the party who wasn’t staring off into the forest to their right. Passing them through the darkening trees, on a parallel course, was the strangest thing Quentin had ever seen.

It was a birch tree, striding along through the forest. Its trunk forked a meter from the ground to form two legs on which it took stiff, deliberate steps. It was so thin that it was hard to keep track of in the half-light, but its white bark stood out from the dark trunks around it. Its thin upper branches whipped and snapped against the trees it pushed past. It looked more like a machine or a marionette than a person. Quentin wondered how it kept its balance.

“Holy crap, ” said Josh.

Without speaking they began to trail after it. The tree didn’t hail them, but for a moment its crown of branches twisted in their direction, as if it were glancing over a shoulder it didn’t have. In the stillness they could actually hear it creaking as it foraged along, like a rocking chair. Quentin got the distinct impression it was ignoring them.

After the first five minutes of magical wonderment passed it began to be socially awkward, blatantly following the tree-spirit-thing like this, but it didn’t seem to want to acknowledge them, and they weren’t about to let it go. As a group they clung to it. Maybe this thing was going to put them in the picture, Quentin thought. If it didn’t turn around and beat them all to death with its branches.

Janet kept a close eye on Penny and shushed him whenever he looked like he might be about to say something.

“Let it make the first move, ” she whispered.

“Freak show, ” Josh said. “What is that thing? ”

“It’s a dryad, idiot. ”

“I thought those were girl-trees. ”

“They’re supposed to be sexy girl-trees, ” Josh said plaintively.

“And I thought dryads were oaks, ” Alice said. “That’s a birch. ”

“What makes you think it’s not a girl-tree? ”

“Whatever it is, ” Josh said under his breath, “it’s pay dirt. Fuckin’ tree-thing, man. Pay fuckin’ dirt. ”

The tree was a fast walker, almost bouncing along on its springy, knee-less legs, to the point where soon they would have to break into a half jog to keep up with it. Just when it looked like they were either going to lose their only promising lead so far or segue into an undignified chase scene, it became obvious where it was heading anyway.

HUMBLEDRUM

Ten minutes later Quentin was sitting in a booth in a dimly lit bar with a pint of beer on the table in front of him, as yet untasted. Though unexpected, this felt like a good development for him. Bar, booth, beer. This was a situation where he knew how to handle himself, whatever world he was in. If he’d been training for anything since he left Brakebills, it was this.

Identical pints stood in front of the others. It was late afternoon, five thirty or so, Quentin guessed, though how could you know? Were there even twenty-four hours in a day here? Why would there be? Despite Penny’s insistence that the tree had been “leading” them here, it was pretty clear they would have found the inn on their own. It was a dark, low-roofed log cabin with a sign outside featuring two crescent moons; a delicate little clockwork mechanism caused the two moons to revolve around each other when the wind blew. The cabin was backed up against, and appeared almost to emerge from, a low hillock that humped up out of the forest floor.

Cautiously pushing inside, through swinging doors, they discovered what could have passed for a period room in a museum of Colonial America: a long narrow chamber with a bar against one wall. It reminded Quentin of the Historick Olde Innes he’d wandered through when he was visiting his parents in Chesterton.

Only one other booth was occupied, by a family(? )—a tall, white-haired old man; a high-cheekboned woman who might have been in her thirties; and a serious little girl. Obviously locals. They sat perfectly silent and erect, staring balefully at the empty cups and saucers in front of them. The little girl’s hooded eyes expressed a precocious acquaintance with adversity.

The walking birch tree had disappeared, presumably into a back room. The bartender wore a curious old-fashioned uniform, black with many brass buttons, something like what an Edwardian policeman might have worn. He had a narrow, bored face and heavy black five o’clock shadow, and he slowly polished pint glasses with a white cloth in the manner of bartenders since time immemorial. Otherwise the room was empty, except for a large brown bear wearing a waistcoat sitting slumped in a sturdy armchair in one corner. It wasn’t clear whether the bear was conscious or not.

Richard had brought along several dozen small gold cylinders in the hope that they would work as a kind of universal interdimensional currency. The bartender accepted one without comment, weighed it expertly in his palm, and returned a handful of change: four dented, wobbly coins stamped with an assortment of faces and animals. Two of them bore mottos in two different unreadable scripts; the third was a well-worn Mexican peso from the year 1936; the fourth turned out to be a plastic marker from a board game called Sorry. He set about filling pewter tankards.

Josh stared into his dubiously and took a fastidious sniff. He was as fidgety as a third-grader.

“Just drink it! ” Quentin hissed irritably. God, people were such losers sometimes. He lifted his own tankard. “Cheers. ”

He swished the liquid around in his mouth. It was bitter and carbonated and alcoholic and definitely beer. It filled him with confidence and a renewed sense of purpose. He’d had a scare, but it’s funny how it—and the beer—were now focusing his mind wonderfully. Quentin shared his booth with Richard, Josh, and Ana& #239; s—he had successfully avoided sitting next to either Alice or Janet, or Penny—and they exchanged multiple transverse glances over their foamy pints. They were a long way from where they’d started out that morning.

“I don’t think that bear is stuffed! ” Josh whispered excitedly. “I think that’s a real bear! ”

“Let’s buy it a beer, ” Quentin said.

“I think it’s asleep. And anyway it doesn’t look that friendly. ”

“Beer might help with that, ” Quentin said. He felt punchy. “This could be the next clue. If it’s a talking beer, I mean a talking bear, we could, you know, talk to it. ”

“About what? ”

Quentin shrugged and took another sip.

“Just get a feel for what’s going on around here. I mean, what else are we doing here? ”

Richard and Ana& #239; s hadn’t touched their drinks. Quentin took another big gulp just to spite them.

“We’re playing it safe, is what we’re doing, ” Richard said. “This is strictly reconnaissance. We’re avoiding any unnecessary contact. ”

“You’re kidding me. We’re in Fillory, and you don’t want to talk to anybody? ”

“Absolutely not. ” Richard sounded shocked, shocked, at the very idea. “We’ve made contact with another plane of existence. What, that’s not enough for you? ”

“As a matter of fact, it’s not. A giant praying mantis tried to kill me earlier today, and I’d like to know why. ”

Fillory had yet to give Quentin the surcease from unhappiness he was counting on, and he was damned if he was leaving before he got what he wanted. Relief was out there, he knew it, he just needed to get deeper in, and he wasn’t about to let Richard slow him down. He had to jump the tracks, get out of his Earth-story, which wasn’t going so well, and into the Fillory-story, where the upside was infinitely higher. Anyway, the mood he was in, Quentin was willing to take any position on any subject with anybody if it meant he could pick a fight.

“Barkeep! ” Quentin said, louder than necessary. As an afterthought he gave himself a thick Wild West drawl. If it feels right, go with it. He jerked his thumb at the bear. “ ’Nother round fer mah friend the bar there in the corner. ”

A bar in a bar. Clever. In the other booth Eliot, Alice, Janet, and Penny all turned around in unison to look at him. The man in the uniform just nodded wearily.

The bear, it emerged, drank only peach schnapps, which it sipped from delicate thimble-size glasses. Given its bulk, Quentin guessed it could consume a more or less unlimited amount of it. After two or three it ambled over on all fours and joined them, dragging over the heavy armchair, the only piece of furniture in the room capable of supporting its weight, by hooking its claws into the chair’s much-abused upholstery and pulling. It looked way too big to be moving around in a confined space.

The bear was named Humbledrum, and it was, as its name suggested, a very modest bear. It was a brown bear, it explained in deep sub-subwoofer tones, a species larger than the black bear but much much smaller than the mighty grizzly bear, though the grizzly was in fact a variety of brown bear. It was not, Humbledrum reiterated periodically, half the bear that some of those grizzlies were.

“But it’s not just about who’s the biggest bear, ” Quentin offered. They were bonding. He wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted from the bear, but this seemed like a good way to get it. He was drinking Richard’s beer, having finished his own. “There’s other ways to be a good bear. ”

Humbledrum’s head bobbed enthusiastically.

“Oh yes. Oh yes. I am a good bear. I never meant to say that I’m a bad bear. I’m a good bear. I respect territories. I’m a respectful bear. ” Humbledrum’s terrifyingly huge paw fell on the table emphatically, and it put its black muzzle very close to Quentin’s nose. “I am a very. Respectful. Bear. ”

The others were conspicuously silent, or talked among themselves, elaborately play-acting that they were unaware of the fact that Quentin was conversing with a drunk magic bear. Richard had bailed out early, swapping places with the always-game Janet. Josh and Ana& #239; s huddled together, looking trapped. If Humbledrum noticed any of this, it didn’t seem to bother it.

Quentin understood that he was operating outside most of the group’s comfort level. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Eliot was trying to shoot him warning glances from the other table, but he avoided them. He didn’t care. He had to push things forward; he was afraid of staying still. This was his play, and he was playing it, and he was going to play it his way till it was played out. Everybody else could either get on board or button their candy asses on back to Drop City.

⇐ Предыдущая 17 18 19 20 212223 24 25 26 Следующая ⇒