Nicola Griffith (34 page)
“What kind of wound?”
“Puncture. Tear. Made with a long, rusty nail. And if you did treat him, did he die?”
He said nothing for a long time. “Let me ask you a question instead. You know I need the money—the clinic needs it. If I refuse to give you confidential information, would you withhold it?”
The man had saved my life. He knew it, I knew it. I sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” That wasn’t enough. The thirty thousand was stolen, anyway. “You can have the thirty thousand. No strings attached.”
He went to his terminal and for a moment I thought he was going to pull the information I needed, all the case notes, because I had made the selfless choice—like the child in a fairy tale being rewarded by the old witch in disguise. But life isn’t a fairy tale. He was making up my bill.
He held it out.
“Thank you,” I managed, and headed for the door.
At the wharf, the lights were still out from my last visit. The surface of the river was choppy in the wind. I watched it awhile. The riverbank is the one place in the jungle where an animal is visible from the air and the ground.
The grate in the pavement was hard to lift one-handed, and I got a bruise on my wrist when it fell the first time I tried. It seemed appropriate. This should not be too easy and painless.
Turning on the lights was like stepping out into the open. “My name,” I said to the wind, to the river rolling to the sea, “is Frances Lorien van de Oest. I live here.”
I would spend the rest of my life by the river, being visible.
I got to the plant just as the shift was leaving. Magyar was the last out. Maybe she had been waiting as long as she could, giving me extra time, or putting off the possibility that I might not be there. Her shoulders were hunched against the wind, her face pinched and worried. Her head turned this way and that, searching.
I stepped into the light. “Magyar.”
When she saw me she smiled. It was like opening the door of a furnace: a blast of light, fire, warmth. For me. This woman’s eyes were bright and lively, full of herself and her vision of me. I could see myself there, if I looked.
I held out my hands. She took them, then lifted my left hand to the light. “What happened?”
“I had the false PIDA removed.” For a while, I would be nobody but the Lore I had made. We stood in the street, wind howling around us, Magyar’s hair streaming behind her. I imagined her in my kitchen in the morning, skin warm and smelling of sleep, that beautiful hair tucked behind her ears, making coffee, talking of this and that. “Come home with me.”
“Yes.”
We walked hand in hand down the street. When I met my family again, I would introduce them to both of us.
© KELLEY ESKRIDGE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicola Griffith (
www.nicolagriffith.com
) is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she taught self-defense and fronted a band before discovering writing and moving to the U.S. She is the author of the novels
Ammonite
,
The Blue Place
, and
Stay
, and she is coeditor of the Bending the Landscape series. Her work has been translated into several languages, and she has won a variety of awards. She lives in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, where she takes enormous pleasure in just about everything.
BY NICOLA GRIFFITH
Ammonite
Slow River
The Blue Place
Stay
More praise for
Slow River
“A dark and intensely involving story . . . In
Slow River
, Griffith—with language brilliant and clear as sun-glittered water—delineates a woman’s struggle to remain herself and to stay alive.”
—The Phoenix Gazette
“Griffith’s heroine, Lore van de Oest, is a futuristic lesbian Patty Hearst. Kidnapped from her wealthy family shortly before her eighteenth birthday, Lore is abused, degraded, and ultimately left half dead on the streets of an unnamed European city. Salvation comes in the form of Spanner, a charismatic outlaw, who both seduces and manipulates Lore. . . . This is a character who always knows who she is. And that puts Lore, along with her creator, among the most intriguing women in sci-fi.”
—Deneuve
“With her first novel
Ammonite
. . . Griffith revealed herself to be fluent in presenting realistic science and its implications, capable of cinematic clarity in her prose, insightful with emotions and character. . . . Replicating many of her debut’s themes and strengths,
Slow River
nonetheless expands into new territory.”
—The Washington Post
“With its persuasive characters trying to form identities in an unstable society, its midnight streets and shabby apartments, and its vast industrial engines,
Slow River
is a powerful prose poem on issues that are already with us. . . . It’s a worthy and radically different successor to its author’s acclaimed debut.”
—Locus
Preview of Slow River
She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore van de Oest was the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families . . . and now she was nobody.
Then out of the rain walked Spanner, an expert data pirate who took her in, cared for her wounds, and gave her the freedom to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore if she didn’t want to be found: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped . . . but she paid for her newfound freedom in crime, deception, and degradation—over and over again.
Lore had a choice: she could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner . . . and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and inventing her future.
Yet only by confronting her past, her family, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be . . .
A Del Rey
®
Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1995 by Nicola Griffith
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Ballantine Books in hardcover in 1995.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96066
eISBN: 978-0-345-46448-4
v3.0