Strange Dogs

Начало книги

The day after the stick moons appeared, Cara killed a bird.

That wasn’t exactly right. There had been stick moons—which her parents called platforms—as long as Cara could remember. At night, they’d glowed with reflected sunlight like burnt orange bones, and in the daytime, they’d been lines of white bent behind the blue. In her books, the moon was always a pale disk or a cookie with a bite taken out, but that was Earth’s moon, Luna. Laconia was different.

So it wasn’t that they had appeared the night before she killed the bird. It was only that they lit up red and blue and gold for the first time ever. Her parents had gotten up from the dinner table and gone out into the yard, staring up into the sky, and she and her little brother, Xan, had followed. Her father stood there slack-jawed, looking up. Her mother had frowned.

The next afternoon, lying in the blue clover by the pond with sunlight warming her skin and making her sleepy, Cara watched the newly glittering stick moons swim through the sky. They were as bright in the daytime sky as stars were against nighttime black. The colors shifted on them, rippling like videos of sea creatures. As if they were a little bit alive. They drifted east to west, high lacy clouds passing underneath them, and Cara at the bottom of the gravity well, looking up into the vastness like it had all been put there for her to appreciate.

Читать дальше →