Read In World City for Free Online

world’ with them. Then, as she changed the strange, geometrical wasteland she had constructed into an arrangement of towers and palaces, Miranda imagined that a part of the real world was changing accordingly. The game carried an eerie fascination. She felt herself being drawn up into her head; into a strange, cool, crystalline way of seeing things. It was rather like the feeling when she had believed herself able to walk into the tapestry scene in her father’s study; detached; free of the world around her.
    Now, on the island, staring at the jungle and turning it into pieces of grey jigsaw puzzle, she could just about recover something of that detachment. There was a difference though. Now she felt her life depended on it.
    *
    Miranda and her father had travelled most of the way to the island in a large, spacious airliner. Then, in somewhere hot, dimly lit and full of black faces, they transferred to a tiny propeller-driven plane that they had to themselves. After bumping through turbulence and making several steep, banking turns, they touched down on an airfield set among mountains, the runway seemingly barely big enough for a bird to land on.
    After climbing down from the plane onto the shimmering heat of the tarmac, they had been obliged to walk across to the airfield’s main building where there was another sea of black faces, looking to where a slightly larger plane had just landed and was beginning to disgorge its cargo of passengers. Miranda carried a small bag across her shoulder in which she had the book and two handheld computer games that had been her sole occupation during the journey. She felt herself beginning to sweat in the humidity. She didn’t like this place they had come to. Her distaste deepened with the smell of engine fumes and the sight of the stained concrete of the airfield building, then the milling black faces that crowded around her; the shouting, the waving and the agitated, excited exchanges, the scattered splashes of colour on the materials the women wore, the sweat-stained armpits of the men’s white shirts.
    Whether or not her father liked it, she couldn’t tell. For most of the journey he had been working a portable screen, which she had watched him take from his briefcase at the beginning of the flight in the same way the gardener back home would have reached for a trowel or knife – a barely conscious action, only to be noticed if she had surreptitiously moved the expected implement. Now her father applied himself to the island’s air terminal with the same determined detachment.
    Without pausing, he headed directly for a door signed ‘immigration’, beyond which was a room with clattering air-conditioning units, a few worn-looking desks and two uninterested officials talking easily to each other. Her father had some documents immediately to hand, and Miranda watched as his certainties carried the officers through the formalities at a pace that looked unfamiliar to them. Then they were passing out of the narrow confines of the immigration room, away from the harsh, cold draughts of the air-conditioning units and back into the close, tropical heat of the main hall.
    A man stepped out of the throng and came straight across to her father. “Mister Whitlam, welcome. I am Charles Lefevre. Your man, O’Donnell, has made everything ready for you. I insisted that I came to welcome you myself, though.”
    Miranda watched her father grasp the proffered hand. She watched and listened as practical issues about their baggage were dealt with, then followed after her father and Mr Lefevre, who, she noticed, had skin a shade lighter than most she had seen so far. He opened the back doors of a quite smart-looking limousine, but her father nodded that he would sit in the front next to Mr Lefevre.
    Miranda clambered into the rear alone. The car was cool inside and had tinted windows. She felt it move off and stared at the tinted world outside. The road