Ghosts of Punktown by Jeffrey Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

city? And hadn’t he only been defending himself?
     
         But then, as they stared at his face, he knew that wasn’t the reason. He reached up to touch his cheeks to confirm that the scars were no longer there. The dead Ha Jiin’s mask had melted away like an ice sculpture.
     
         And Stake knew, without having to look at a mirror – knew, from the reflections of himself in the eyes of these confused tenants – what mask he now wore instead.
     

 
     
     
    Relics
     
     
     
    1
     
         The other two buildings that made up the Triplex could be seen from various windows in her family’s apartment, but Cynth had never been inside them. Despite the fact that they were indistinguishable from the building she lived in, the eight-year-old had no particular awareness of them – just as she had no real sense of the many apartments within her building, identical to her own. For Cynth, the two towers that completed the three points of the complex’s triangle blended into the overall skyline that constituted the city of Punktown. The multifarious structures of this colony – established by Earth on the world called Oasis – canceled each other out in their sheer profusion, a brain static that she dismissed as the background of her life. She preferred things simple, individual, one-on-one.
     
         “Don’t dawdle, Cynthia, you’ll be late to school,” said Mr. Moon. Only he called her Cynthia.
     
         “It’s snowing!” she exclaimed as she hitched up her black tights. Snow was a single thing to capture her attention, something she could wrap her head around. Snow muffled the city’s babble, made the too diverse buildings comfortingly homogenous. Snow activated ancestral instincts, nostalgic notions of family and shelter.
     
         “Yes, I know, that’s why you must dress warm today.” Mr. Moon had laid out Cynth’s clothes on her bed while she was still in the bath he had drawn for her.
     
         “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Don’t you watch me, now!” she teased as she pulled her pajama top off to switch into her blouse.
     
         In the living room of apartment 933 there was a glowing circular plate set into the wall. This and the panel beneath it were the apartment’s control center for Mr. Moon, as Cynth had named him. His greenish face shone from the circular plate: that of a benevolent, smiling moon rendered in an antique style, such as one might see in a fairytale illustration. She had told her father that she wished the face plate could be transferred to her bedroom wall, or that she could use the living room as her bedroom instead. When she lounged on the sofa, watching VT, she liked that the only other light in the room came from that pale lunar face. Her father had showed her how the building’s interactive system could also be accessed from any computer in the apartment, and called up Mr. Moon’s face on the screen of her room’s computer. Now his was the only light when she slept, bathing her in its green glow.
     
         “I won’t look,” he assured her, though his eyes remained unmoving, unblinking. “Are you finished with your breakfast?”
     
         “What do you think?” She gestured at her bowl, its inside stained with the bright yellow remnants of luul, a sweet porridge favored by the indigenous Choom people. She had been reluctant to try luul at first, but her mother had insisted and now it was the only breakfast Cynth would accept. She regretted her sarcastic tone and said, “Yes, please, you can take it now.”
     
         There was a series of tracks recessed into the ceiling, the widest of these being a direct chute to the kitchen. Out of this track, one of the ceiling’s brass colored arms unfolded, silent and graceful, as delicate and intricate as the limb of a mechanical insect. Its fingers lifted her breakfast tray up into the chute and bore it away toward the kitchen.
     
         As she slipped into her crisp