Lirika9: переводы

→“Lie still. It won’t be so bad if you keep yourself flat.” He sounded tired and defeated. Claire blinked back gray fog, fighting her way back into the world, and almost wished she hadn’t when he shifted a little, and she saw—really saw—what had happened to him.

→“You bit me,” she said. It came out surprised, and a little sad. She started to sit up, but that didn’t go so well; she sank back to the cold stone floor, feeling sick and vague, as if she were fading out of the world.

→She didn’t think she’d ever seen anybody look so miserable in her life, and for a moment she couldn’t think why he would look that way, and then it all came crashing back.

→Four hours later, it was approaching sunrise, Claire was bone-tired, and she’d bagged all of the cameras on her list, including the one in the football team’s shower room, which was an interesting experience. Kim had clearly been combining business with personal pleasure. She took the portal back to the alley behind Common Grounds, intending to pick up Shane and Eve, but they were nowhere in sight. She called Shane’s cell, and heard it ringing, but it was distant and muffled.

→She focused on the portal, shifted frequencies, and started on her camera-destroying mission.

→Claire checked the list. “Right. The first twenty are easy—all in common areas. Eve, I’ll send you and Shane to the alley behind Common Grounds. I’ll take the university.”

→“Someplace deserted,” Claire said. “Much as I hate it, how about German’s? I don’t want anybody overhearing us.”

→Kim had kept records—a hard copy printout stuffed in a cabinet drawer next to the wrecked editing machine. It listed a total of seventy-four cameras, all over Morganville. “She must have added a couple at the last minute. This is going to take hours,” Eve said. “We’ll have to split up, each take ten or so. Myrnin and Michael, you’ve got the Vamptown cameras. Claire, Shane, here you go. Knock yourselves out.”

→Claire and Eve backed up against the wall, holding hands, as the two vampires systematically destroyed every bit of data storage in the place. It took a while, but they were thorough, and when the last piece of equipment was broken into random parts, Shane said, “I thought that would feel better, somehow.”

→Michael helped Eve out of the chair, picked it up, and smashed it into the editing station. He ripped out the hard drive from the video editing system and smashed it against the wall.

→“She’d rather move us and destroy all evidence we were ever here. It’s always been her final option. You have no idea how many times she’s come close recently.”

→Claire swallowed. “We can’t let her do that.”

→“Losses being humans,” Shane said.

→“Do we?” Myrnin looked at the array of hard drives. “You spoke of more than seventy cameras, but I see only sixty or so hard drives. What’s missing, Claire? You know Amelie. You know that her first concern is for her people. If she believes that we’ve been compromised here, she will cut our losses.”

→That seemed a strange left turn. “Why? We’re going to catch them, right? We’ve got the video.”

→“And we will find them,” Myrnin said. “And we will destroy them. There are rules to Morganville, and Kim and this vampire have shattered them beyond all repair. Amelie must never know of this. I’m afraid what she would do.”

→“She didn’t do it alone; you said so yourself. It took a vampire to bug the council, let alone Amelie’s house.”

→Myrnin had told her that, too, from the very first. She’d just never really, really believed it. Myrnin was like a thrill ride, one of those dark carnival tracks where scary things swooped in close but never quite touched you.

→She was unraveling in control, even while she was getting stronger in raw power.

→“Focus,” Myrnin said. “Forward three small steps. Be careful not to overshoot.”