Read Division Zero for Free Online Page A

shelf. A two-inch strip of intense blue light followed it around the curves of her legs, leaving behind a trail of warm skin as well as smoke wherever any hint of hair had been. With that done, she leaned forward and fixed her face with a few dabs of light cosmetics. The little shard of mirror dangling from a bare metal wire presented an annoying reminder of how the superintendent had laughed in her face last week.
    Yeah, he’ll get around to replacing it…
    Perhaps an oversized pink shirt with a Hello Kitty face on it did not demand enough respect from the lazy bastard in the basement. All the police training in the world could not overcome her innocent face.
Next time I see him I’ll go in uniform.
She grinned. I-Ops blacks could change her cute into creepy, at least for anyone who understood what they meant. The fear in people’s eyes as they backed away bothered her, but she owed him one; as well as Theodore for breaking the mirror in the first place.
    Yesterday’s underwear went into the top of a white box mounted to the wall. She took a clean set, still sealed in plastic film, out of the bottom and put them on. The machine hummed to life as it cleansed, wrapped, and added them to a stack of waiting unmentionables. When she opened the bathroom door, a flash of white light raced away from the seams and sent a shimmer around the entire room.

    Standing on the corner a block from her building, Kirsten checked the time and grumbled.
Where the hell is the damn PubTran, it’s three minutes late.
    The wind blew restless today; the cheap plastic clasp she had used to hold her hair up threatened to fail at any second. The gale tugged and whipped at her jogging suit, sending the loose-fitting grey material into a flutter audible over the steady stream of hovercars. Forty stories up, they streamed amid tall buildings blocking the sky in all directions. When she looked down, she groaned at an older man standing alongside her with a smile on his face and hands folded behind him.
    “Dad, I’m twenty-two now. I think I can get to work on my own.”
    The old man’s smile grew wider. He looked to be in his fifties, but his unassuming grey slacks and dark blue flannel shirt made him seem older.
    He sidled closer. “It’s a dangerous city, dear. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”
    “Not that I’d expect you to have noticed, but I
am
a police officer. I am not defenseless.” She patted the impression of her sidearm in the athletic bag.
    “What if I just want to spend time with you, sweetie?”
    Kirsten shot him a strained look. “Sure, that’s easy to say
now
.”
    Her father deflated. “You still blame me, don’t you?” He sighed. “I guess I spent too much time on the road with the job. Things were… strange at home, you know.”
    She slung the bag over her shoulder and folded her arms. He had not taken well to the ghosts that came to visit her as a child. Not wanting to let her emotional state leak out of her voice, she remained silent.
    He patted her on the back, a guilty resignation in his voice. “I never saw that side of your mother when I was home. By the time I knew what she was doing, you had already run away.”
    She behaved herself for the two days a month you were around. Why do you think I cried so much when you got ready to take a trip?
    “Look, dad. What’s done is done. I don’t blame you for anything.” She glanced at him for a moment before looking away, wondering if he believed what she had spent the past twelve years trying to convince herself.
    It was the ghosts he ran from, not me.
    The PubTran bus shuddered to a halt at the corner with a pneumatic hiss, wrapped in a shroud of vapor. As the doors opened, people filed past her onto it; one or two sent odd looks her way. She trudged up the stairs, grabbing and swinging around a standee post and flopping into a seat with its back to the windows.
    Her father took the spot to her left. “Don’t they pay you enough to afford a car? Can’t you