Читать онлайн «Incarceron»
Автор Кэтрин Фишер
Annotation
Imagine a living prison so vast that it contains corridors and forests, cities and seas. Imagine a prisoner with no memory, who is sure he came from Outside, even though the prison has been sealed for centuries and only one man, half real, half legend, has ever escaped. Imagine a girl in a manor house in a society where time has been forbidden, where everyone is held in a seventeenth century world run by computers, doomed to an arranged marriage that appals her, tangled in an assassination plot she both dreads and desires. One inside, one outside. But both imprisoned. Imagine a war that has hollowed the moon, seven skullrings that contain souls, a flying ship and a wall at the world's end. Imagine the unimaginable. Imagine Incarceron.
Catherine Fisher
CRYSTAL EAGLE, DARK SWAN
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UNERGROUND, THE STARS ARE LEGENDS
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CHAINED, HAND AND FOOT
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A WORLD THAT HANGS IN SPACE
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Catherine Fisher
INCARCERON
CRYSTAL EAGLE, DARK SWAN
Who can chart the vastness of Incarceron?
Its halls and viaducts, its chasms?
Only the man who has known freedom
Can define his prison.
Finn had been flung on his face and chained to the stone slabs of the transitway. His arms, spread wide, were weighted with links so heavy, he could barely drag his wrists off the ground. His ankles were tangled in a slithering mass of metal, bolted through a ring in the pavement. He couldn't raise his chest to get enough air. He lay exhausted, the stone icy against his cheek. But the Civicry were coming at last.
He felt them before he heard them; vibrations in the ground, starting tiny and growing until they shivered in his teeth and nerves. Then noises in the darkness, the rumble of migration trucks, the slow hollow clang of wheel rims. Dragging his head around, he shook dirty hair out of his eyes and saw how the parallel grooves in the floor arrowed straight under his body. He was chained directly across the tracks.
Sweat slicked his forehead. Gripping the frosted links with one glove he hauled his chest up and gasped in a breath. The air was acrid and smelled of oil.
It was no use yelling yet. They were too far off and wouldn't hear him over the clamor of the wheels until they were well into the vast hall. He would have to time it exactly. Too late, and the trucks couldn't be stopped, and he would be crushed. Desperately, he tried to avoid the other thought. That they might see him and hear him and not even care.
Lights.
Small, bobbing, handheld lights. Concentrating, he counted nine, eleven, twelve; then counted them again to have a number that was firm, that would stand against the nausea choking his throat.
Nuzzling his face against the torn sleeve for some comfort he thought of Keiro, his grin, the last mocking little slap as he'd checked the lock and stepped back into the dark. He whispered the name, a bitter whisper: "Keiro. "
Vast halls and invisible galleries swallowed it. Fog hung in the metallic air. The trucks clanged and groaned.
