Read Grey for Free Online

problems. I didn't want her in my bed when I came home, and I certainly didn't want her asking me to hold her clothes while she stripped. I said, "She scares me."
    Joelene folded her hands in her lap and tilted her head in just that way she had when regurgitating her facts. "Reports indicate that she's taking a combination of self-administered color therapy and an illegal and powerful painkiller, strengthener, and mood shaper: aru."
    "aru?"
    "Actually, it's an amazing and useful drug." She frowned. "The families have exaggerated the dangers of everything the 'Ceutical Warlords make. Whatever else they are, the slub rulers are masters of biochemistry." I thought she was going to continue in that vein, but she shrugged. "In any case, your mother's group, Tanoshi No Wah, is losing money. You would be a huge draw, of course."
    "Everyone just wants to use me," I complained.
    She pursed her lips as if she were going to speak, but stood abruptly. "We have a meeting."
     
    Instead of being driven to the business building across the compound, Joelene suggested we walk along the oxygen gardens and the reflecting pool. It sounded like a good idea, but the temperature-regulated air and the filtered sunlight didn't lift my spirits. Instead, I felt crushed under the vast, ashen sky. While nothing that had happened was Mother's fault, her tantrum made me feel doomed. I would never escape my family. I would never escape their wishes and their desires for me. As we approached the wood-shingled office building, I asked Joelene, "Why?" knowing she would understand.
    She stopped before the door and spoke quietly as if telling a secret. "I have diverted some of your discretionary funds to Tanoshi No Wah to try and help your mother and her friends. They have a lot of medical needs, and I believe they're poorly managed. It's the best we can do now."
    I didn't even know I had discretionary funds. "But why is she with a carnival in the slubs? Why did she leave us for that?" I felt she did it to embarrass me, like everything else she did.
    Joelene glanced to her right as if she were trying to think what to say, but then she stood there, as if momentarily transfixed.
    I turned to see that she was staring at the PartyHaus. At one time it had been the crown jewel of the compound, but now its black and gold Rococo façade was matted with dirt and dust. From the roof were long, pale green lines of oxidation. And at the top of the stairs, the enormous front doors were splattered with droppings as thousands of birds had made nests in the intricately carved fornicating animals. It was a combination disco, hotel, brothel, and amusement park where I had spent the nights of my youth at one hundred and fifty beats per minute.
    When Joelene's eyes met mine, I felt that we both had the same mood: a nebulous sense of defeat, under-painted with the caustic dread of seeing Father.
    Finally, she nodded toward the door. We entered the building, and found meeting theater five. The three-hundred-seat auditorium was empty, dark, and cold. Joelene located the controls, and as she turned on house lights, I sat in one of the orange, over-stuffed chairs toward the front. Above the stage hung an enormous, glowing estimator clock—a family antique. Across the top it read: Hiro Bruce Rivers Arrival Time. Below were the stylized, red numbers.
    "Joelene," I said, at once relieved and annoyed to see that it read: one hour and thirty-three minutes. "I'm not waiting."
    "That can't be right," she muttered as she opened a screen and checked with his people. "They say five or ten."
    As if the estimator clock had heard, the glowing numbers on the clock's face flickered then read fourteen minutes eighty-one seconds and began counting down.
    "The freeboot who shot you," said Joelene, reading from her screen, "is suspected to have been from Antarctica. The family council reports that the medicated bullets were prototypes stolen in Europa two weeks ago. They suspected he was a lone gunman.