gingergirll: переводы

→“Well, what you see is pretty much what you get, except—” He gazed at Eve for a few long seconds, then shook his head. “Nah, you won’t be interested in that.”

→Come to think of it, it probably had.

→“I was going more for horrifying, but yeah, that works, too. Okay, can we agree on nothing in a minivan, please?”

→“Fired? Not in Durram. You don’t get fired in Durram ; you get embarrassed.” Linda drove a couple of blocks, past some empty shops and one empty gas station, then took a right turn and then a left. “Here it is.”

→“Huh,” she said as they passed the town limits sign, barely readable from shotgun blasts. “Usually there’s a deputy out here in the mornings. Guess somebody overslept. Probably Tom. Tom likes those late nights at the bar, sometimes; he’s gonna catch hell for blowing it again.”

→“You mean fired?”

→She drank it fast, faster than Shane and Eve could gulp their own, and in about five minutes the four of them were piling into the bench seat of Linda’s pickup truck, with more rust than paint on the outside, and sagging seats on the inside. Claire sat on Shane’s lap, which wasn’t at all a bad thing from her perspective. From the way he held her in place, she didn’t think he objected, either. Linda started up the truck with a wheezing rattle of metal, and the engine roared as she tore out of the gravel parking lot and onto the narrow two-lane road heading toward Durram.

→“Where else I got to go? My husband’s buried here; came back dead from the war in Iraq, that first one. My family’s here, such as they are, including Ernie, my grandson. Ernie runs one of the car lots, which is why I figure we can find you what you want at a good deal this early in the morning.” She grinned. “If an old woman can’t make her own grandson get out of bed before dawn to do her a favor, there’s no point in living. Just let me finish my coffee and we’ll be on our way.”

→“In Durram?” Linda shook her head. “Couple of used places, that’s all. Any new cars, we go to the city for them. Not that there’s many new cars round here these days. Durram used to be an oil town, back in the boom days, pumped a lot of crude out of the ground, but when it folded, it hit the ground hard. People been leaving ever since. It never was huge, but what you see now ain’t more than half what it was fifty years ago, and even then a lot of those buildings are closed up.”

→Eve’s crying was uncontrollable now, but Claire couldn’t help her. She couldn’t help herself.

→“Let’s just stop right there, son. I don’t want to be making any mistakes about how we do this.” The sheriff cleared his throat and recited something about rights and remaining silent. Claire couldn’t make sense out of it. She felt sick and horribly faint.

→“Computers,” Myrnin said, then shoved the laptop she’d put out for him aside and glared at it as if it had personally insulted him. “The technology is entirely idiotic. Who built this? Baboons?”

→Still, no matter how nice the decor, Myrnin was never less than half crazy. He was under pressure from Amelie, Claire knew; with the death—could computers die?—of Ada, the town’s master computer; he was struggling to figure out a way to make a replacement, but without putting a human brain into it, which Claire strongly discouraged, seeing how well that had worked out with Ada, and the fact that Claire herself was almost certainly the next candidate.

→The afternoon was spent with Myrnin at his freaky mad-scientist lab, which was actually much nicer after the renovations he’d done: new equipment; computers; nice bookcases; decent lighting instead of crazy turn-of-last-century things that emitted sparks when you tried to turn them off or on.

→“Yeah, we’re leaving tonight. You’ll be okay?”

→“Can it be cheated?”

→She swallowed, picked up her stuff, and left.

→“I guess you’re coming with us tonight?”

→She did, actually. But sometimes, it was just impossible to do anything else.

→“One of these days,” Oliver said, still looking toward the street, “you’re going to be too clever for your own good, Claire. You do realize that.”