The Amber Columns (The City of Dark Pleasures Book 2) by Bibi Rizer Read Free Book Online

and other more outlandish things. At first men were arrested and exiled—at least that’s what we were told. Then the cut gangs started. Terrified men formed alliances with powerful ones and did their bidding. Women were driven to violence by their own fear. Together they roamed the streets and highway leaving bloodshed and death in their wake.
    As the outside world watched in horror our culture was destroyed. The mainlanders even tried to liberate our people, bombing the abandoned industrial cities on the coast as a warning. But those in control would not relent, because power was too addictive. And our society was deceptively peaceful. Even my mother remarked that our door was never locked, that there was no hunger or homelessness.
    But she knew that it was all an illusion. Now our idyllic island is a prison for all of us, not just those without citizen passes. Now the mainland, the whole of the outside world, views us with such revulsion and distrust that no one is allowed in or out. Though we have some resources, we suffer under an embargo that limits fresh food, certain technologies and almost all cultural commerce. Most of us have never read a book published off-island. Data only travels one way through our servers, from the giant content factories like the one I work in, to the outside world. Never the other way.
    We are all tied at the wrist to a husband that none of us chose, following silently, heads bowed, resigned to this odd kind of stability.
    I’m half tempted to latch onto the ribbon man and surrender to it. I’m as pretty as any of his wives. And as for obedience, compliance—I can fake that.
    Only those outside our system, those with no status at all, servants in the Pleasures, live an honest life, free of delusion and deception. Is it any wonder that as a journalist, driven by my girlish dreams of ultimate truth, that I would be so captivated by one of them? Perhaps that’s why I’m so unable to let Tully go—because I don’t have the truth of him yet. The Tully I met in the dream I had, wired up to his machine, was a creature of my own creation. So have all the Tullys I’ve met in my dreams been—the loving ones, the violent ones, the monstrous ones. Maybe if I can get a handle on the real Tully, I will be free of him.
    Or maybe I just want to disappear into his manufactured dream again.
    As I turn west towards the shambling villas that make up the Amber Columns the crowd thins out. Soon the only other citizens on the promenade are solitary men, furtively keeping to the shadows, their heads bowed, eyes on the sidewalk, as though the slivered crescent moon isn’t particularly pretty tonight. I stop and admire it before committing to the long covered passageways of the Columns. There was a crescent moon that first night I met Tully. Two months have passed since then.
    The Columns radiate heat, and soon I’m so warm I remove my media jacket and sling it over my arm. I wonder if Bray’s warnings to be careful were warranted. The few men I encounter seem to avoid me like I have some disease.
    “Are you selling?” I hear one of them whisper behind me. Glancing back I see he’s addressing a young man couching in a corner. It’s not Tully. I don’t even think this one is a Cull. He has a full beard and a broad bulky build. I don’t hear the rest of the conversation he has with the citizen. They negotiate in low tones and I just catch of glimpse of them disappearing together behind a column.
    I have heard that much of the trade here is conducted outdoors. It seems odd, given the shame that such acts normally evoke. But everything is odd and paradoxical about the Pleasures. My even being here is a paradox, looking for someone who doesn’t even sell what I want, not wanting to buy it anyway.
    And where should I look for him?
    The Columns seem to go on forever, fading into darkness down the end of impossibly long passageways.  I had no idea this part of the Pleasures was so large. Not for the