Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle by Matthew Blakstad Read Free Book Online Page A

>>whisper -> ¶Nightshade
Maybe that has already happened and she is actually facing away from you.
 
    ¶Nightshade >>whisper -> ¶thegrays
AAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHH

Six
    ‘Our PR guy Sam’ is now twenty minutes late. Bad enough Dani has to meet a public relations person when all she wants to do is sleep but to wait for the privilege? Wrong. She double-steps down to reception, looking for someone to complain at.
    She passes Gray on the stairs. His T-shirt today reads, Bluetooth? You can ’ t HANDLE Bluetooth! He gives Dani a two-finger wave over his Mountain Dew but she stumbles past him without responding. Get used to it, buster.
    She peers round the frosted pane dividing the stairwell from reception. Apparently ‘Our PR Guy Sam’ is already here and is kicking back an oversize cappo while schmoozing Mary at the front desk. Mary pats and strokes her beehive as though it’s an erogenous zone. Perhaps it is. No sign someone might be upstairs waiting for an appointment.
    )) ignorehead ((
    Dani’s primed to give them a dose but something holds her back. The man has his back to her but his possessive slouch gives out a signal. It takes three seconds to register: ‘Our PR Guy Sam’ is Sam Corrigan.
    Sam.
    Dani puts her head down and makes it to the lift without running or blacking out. Only when she’s heaved the grille doors shut and hit Four does she manage another breath. The car grinds upward.
     
    She first knew Sam at sixth-form college, though he never seemed to know her back. They moved with different tribes. She the raging goth-girl, lording it over the Computer Centre nerds, he the lean and beautiful boy who shared the impeccable politics and the perfect skin of his whole golden circle of friends. Star-crossed and fucked-up from the start, Dani never stood a chance. For the whole two years she stumbled in his presence, tongue-tied with longing, sure he was mocking her each time her back was turned. Then at last, panicked by the fast-approaching headlights of graduation, she bet everything on one great declaration at the post-A-level piss-up. Come the night, though, he was walled off by a gauntlet of glowing teen perfection she didn’t dare run – and by the time she’d drunk up the courage to approach him, he and his angel cohort had already swooped away to some hip and distant London club. Dani had missed her last and only chance at Sam.
    Except that she saw him one more time, by the purest chance, on a trip to Greece in the summer after uni. Holidays sometimes expose us to these sideways swipes of coincidence. Usually the spell fades when you return to daily life, but sometimes you don’t shake it. That’s how it was for Dani. It’s seven years now since Sam materialised at that island resort but he’s stayed with her like an after-image of the sun.
    Maybe if he hadn’t happened to be staying on that particular island, in that particular week, she’d have forgotten all about him. She was already going out with Gray by then, and she barely knew a world existed beyond the two of them. Fresh from uni, with nowhere much to be and no idea how they’d go about changing the world together, she and Gray had moved from 300-mile-apart student digs to find themselves crammed together in a tiny Bethnal Green studio. Their love – if that’s what it was – had started in the cloud. They hadn’t met physically for the first three months they were together. Now they were boxed up together in a single barely furnished space, lit by four unshaded bulbs, their only view a bare brick wall two metres outside their window. Every night they sat dual-screening on a fraying sofa, messaging one another to break the silence they’d discovered in the real. The future lay open in front of them, empty as their fridge. One day they dropped it all and flew off on the sunny promise of a last-minute online package to Paxos.
    Dani shed her jeans and steel-cap boots, picked up a flowery little dress. Gray stuck to his standard-issue