And All the Stars Read Online Free Page A

gowns, and
plenty of the skinny jeans and shirtdresses he was commonly photographed
in. Gaps here and there – he'd been
filming overseas for the past two months – but still a bountiful range of
possibilities.
    Her own clothes
drip-drying in the shower, Madeleine fingered a flower-spattered
shirtdress. She was shorter and narrower
of shoulder than Tyler, but had the same curveless figure, so likely some of his clothes would fit. A pattern in black and gold caught her eye
and she lifted out a silken dressing-gown. Koi carp in an irezumi style: brilliant golds and iridescent green against black. She slipped it on, and hit redial once again.
    "Give it up,
Michael," sighed a warm, throaty voice. "There's nothing you can do about it."
    "Tyler."
    " Leina ?" Tyler
laughed, that infamous burble capped with a soft intake of breath, a tiny,
shiver-worthy ah! "I think
I'm going to be a little late, kiddo. Are you at my place?"
    Only Tyler had
taken seriously her five year-old self's insistence not to be called Maddie . She'd long
ago given up that fight, but enjoyed the fact that he remembered.
    "Yes. Are you–?"
    "Still on the
plane. We were just coming in to
land. And now, well, there's been an
informative lecture on something called bleed air, which apparently requires
running engines. And much debate on
whether all this floating muck rules out a dash to New Zealand or the bright
lights of Tasmania." The amused
voice grew serious. "Please tell me
you were safely flipping through my dirty picture collection when this
happened."
    "You have a
dirty picture collection?"
    "A most
graphic one: best you don't look. Now
tell me."
    "I –
almost." There was a wobble
threatening her voice, and she knew if she tried to explain St James she'd fall
to pieces, so she hurried on. "My
parents think I'm at the Art Gallery. I
didn't want them to try calling here till I arrived. I...well, I guess I'll know sooner than most
what the dust does."
    "Any
symptoms?"
    She hadn't heard
her cousin so grave since her broken arm. And what could she tell him? That
she was tired, and her back hurt, though the shower had helped her
headache. That the dust surely had to be
some kind of attack?
    "Tyler, I
wanted you to do something."
    She could almost
hear the smile. "If it involves
annoying stewardesses I'm all over it. Otherwise–"
    "Get someone
to take a photograph of you, just as you are now, and email it to me."
    " Leina ..."
    "I came here
to paint you Tyler. I want
to–" Her voice had risen, and she
swallowed the rest of the sentence, staring out of the window at an only
faintly hazy sky, and a talcum-dusted world. Sydney's familiar skyline was made unreal not just because of its powder
coating, but by a black lance dwarfing skyscrapers and Sydney Tower. At least double the height of its nearest
rival, it thinned to a needle point.
    "I want to be
painting right now."
    "...I'll see
what I can do." Tyler paused to
murmur to someone off the phone, then added: "I'll call you back if
there's any developments here. Take care
of yourself, Leina ."
    There'd been a
large laptop in the office, which Madeleine fetched out and was glad to find
required no passwords to access the net. She put down her drop-cloth and set up the easel, then went and dug
through Tyler's wardrobe until she unearthed an old tracksuit, since it would
be a crime to get paint on that dressing-gown. No new email had arrived so she tried to ring her parents and, finally,
with a certain level of reluctance, figured out how to make a large screen rise
out of a cabinet, and settled down to watch the apocalypse.
    " ...too
early to call this any kind of catastrophe . We are facing something new and unknown, but
one thing that leaps out is the placement of these towers: Hyde Park in London
and Sydney, Melbourne Park, Central Park, New York, Shinjuku Gyoen , Tokyo. In
every city, no matter how densely crowded, the Spire has been placed so as to
minimise damage–"
    "Still at
the expense of dozens, if