Runner Read Free

standing on both sides of the kitchen door with their backs to the wall. They were strangers, and she had not seen either of them inside the party. They didn't seem to be aware of her, so she looked away, but
held them in the corner of her eye as she drifted in their direction. There was something odd about the way they held themselves, as though they were holding their breath, waiting. Were they going to harm somebody coming out of the kitchen?
    The floor beneath her seemed to bump upward as though the whole building were taking a breath. Then came the noise, a deep, deafening thud, and as it tore the air the force of the explosion blew Jane off her feet and across the hall into the smooth marble wall where the names of past donors were carved.

2
    Sky Woman was contented, living above the clouds with her husband, whom she loved with a fierce, steady passion. There was no time then, because there was no change, and so she was always the same slender young woman who lived in the firmament. She was the one who witnessed the first change ever to occur, because it happened to her. She wanted to get at the roots of a big tree and prepare them as food for her tall, strong husband. She asked him to push over the tree for her, but when he did, the roots came up and tore a hole at Sky Woman's feet, and she fell.
    As she dropped from the sky she felt the wind streaming through her long black hair and heard the fluttering of the fringe on her deerskin skirt. She was falling toward the vast and ageless ocean of dark water far below. She knew that this must be dying, and that she would never again see or touch the husband she loved so much.
    It took time for her to fall so far, and the animals, who had acute senses, could see her from below. The birds felt sorry for her, so they flew upward to meet her. They placed their soft, feathery bodies be-
neath her, and spread their wings to slow her fall into a long, gentle glide to the dark water.

    Jane Whitefield fought the darkness. She struggled to hold in her mind the possibility of waking, and then to make her way toward it. She felt the pain where her body was in contact with the hard, cold terrazzo floor. She opened her eyes to the sight of the overhead lights flickering and then steadying to a sickly yellow glow as the hospital's generators came on. She could hear the voices of confused people, some moaning and others calling to each other. "Marie! Are you all right?" "Lie still." "Mark? Where are you?"
    She sat up, then placed one hand on the wall to steady herself. As she gained a sense of where the pains were coming from and how they hurt, she formed a working theory that they were all only bruises and minor sprains. She got her feet under her and stood. She could hear a clanging alarm and another that made an electronic tone, distant sirens, shouting people...
    The hallway seemed at first to be full of white smoke. She could see human shapes, some on the floor and some moving half-blind through the haze. Jane sniffed and smelled no burning, only plaster dust. She covered her nose and mouth with the fabric above the hem of her gown and looked toward the door from the hall into the kitchen. The two men were gone. She moved to the cafeteria, dodging a stream of men and women in ruined evening clothes, some of them staggering, a few men carrying injured victims in their arms.
    She stopped just inside the cafeteria. For a second she was amazed at the orderly, expert way the party guests were already taking care of the injured, but then she remembered that many of these people in tuxedos or satin dresses were doctors. Where was Carey? She craned her neck to look for him, and then she saw him across
the cafeteria. His tall, thin body was so much a part of her world after ten years of marriage that it wasn't exactly the body of another person anymore, and when her eyes found his shape she felt as though she were touching him. He knelt for a second, then stood and lifted a woman in his