Nothing But Blue Skies Read Free

proper Think command for Stop?’ and ‘Which of these is the Send button, anyway?’; and struggling with all that nonsense made her feel so uptight and irritable—
    At which point, someone grabbed her by the arm and dragged her, quickly and with humiliating efficiency, back into the shelter of the museum doorway. ‘You’re soaked,’ said a familiar voice.
    Sheet lightning filled the sky, thunder rattled the window-panes, drains and soakaways within a five-mile radius gave up and went into denial - indications that Karen wasn’t entirely pleased to see the person who’d just pulled her in out of the rain. ‘Yes,’ Karen muttered, ‘I am, rather.’
    â€˜You were just standing there, getting wet.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Oh. Any particular reason?’
    â€˜I like getting wet.’
    Her rescuer - imagine the Botticelli Venus dressed in a sensible waterproof jacket, of the kind they sell in camping shops - curved her lips slightly in a small, bewildered-contemptuous smile. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Next time you might want to try swimming, though. Same net effect but your clothes stay dry.’
    Karen tightened her scowl up by a click or so. ‘Actually,’ she said truthfully, ‘I can’t swim.’ (Now why on earth had she gone and told her that? No idea; it had just slipped out, like a coin falling out of her pocket when she pulled out her handkerchief.)
    â€˜Really?’
    â€˜Really,’ Karen replied. Not in this body , anyway , she didn’t explain.
    â€˜Well, well. I’ll have to teach you one of these days. I learned to swim when I was two.’
    Too what? Karen didn’t say. Another odd thing; it had nearly stopped raining, even though Karen was so livid she could cheerfully have sunk all twenty claws into the bloody woman’s face.
    Hard to understand, that. She could only assume it was something to do with the crushing weight of inferiority she always felt whenever she was in Ms Ackroyd’s company. ‘I bet,’ she muttered. ‘Came naturally to you, I suppose.’
    â€˜Yes, as it happens. Of course, it’s always easier to learn something if you start young.’ Not a drop, not a single molecule of water appeared to have lodged anywhere on Susan Ackroyd’s super-polymer-monofilament-this-that-and-the-other-upholstered person. Dry as a yak bone in the Gobi Desert, she was. Typical. ‘How come you never learned to swim, then?’
    â€˜Never got round to it.’
    â€˜Ah. Look, it’s stopped raining. A bit late as far as you’re concerned,’ Ms Ackroyd added. ‘See you tomorrow, then.’
    Karen watched her walk away without saying a word, mostly because the things she really wanted to say couldn’t readily be expressed in the effete languages humans used. If, as she asserted, she’d never really understood what love meant until she’d turned her back on the cloud-capped battlements of Home and come down to live among the humans, the same also went for hate, redoubled in spades. Oh sure, she’d felt the odd negative emotion or two in her time - she’d disapproved of evil and disliked the dragon senators who’d criticised her father’s handling of various issues and taken against some of her more obnoxiodus relatives and been annoyed by several of her contemporaries at school - but hate, the real hundred per cent proof matured-in-oak-vats stuff, had taken her completely by surprise. She hated Susan Ackroyd with a pure, distilled ferocity she hadn’t believed possible a few months ago. She hated her for her straight blonde hair, her unflappable calm, her brilliantly incisive mind, her knack of being abominably insulting while not actually saying anything rude, her ability to wear a potato sack and still look like a refugee from a Paris catwalk, the shape of her ears, her unshakeable common sense, her dry, understated sense