Changer's Moon Read Online Free

apartment. He must have followed her up the stairs. She hadn’t noticed him, but she wasn’t in any state to notice anything that didn’t bite her. She twitched the key, finished its turns, dealt with the cheap lock the landlord had provided, pushed the door open and went inside, forgetting the boy before the door was shut behind her.
    In the living room she snapped on the TV without thinking, turned to stare at it, startled by the sudden burst of sound, the flicker of shadow pictures across the screen. She reached out to click it off, then changed her mind and only turned the sound down until it was a meaningless burring that filled the emptiness of the room. She kicked off her shoes, walked around the room picking things up, putting them down, finally dumped the mail out of her purse. The power bill she hadn’t had the courage to open for three days now. A begging letter from the Altiran society, probably incensed about the PM’s newest attack on the parks. She sent them money whenever she could. Money. Her hand shook suddenly. She dropped the rest of the mail. A brown envelope slid from the table to the floor. A story. Rejected. One she thought she’d sold, they kept it six months, asked for and got revisions of several sections. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and fought for control. “Oh, god, where am I going to get the money?”
    With a small impatient sound, she took her hands from her eyes and dropped onto the couch to stare blankly at the phantoms cavorting on the TV screen. After a minute she swung her feet up and stretched out on the lumpy cushions.
    She wasn’t afraid, not the way her doctor thought. Jim wasn’t really good at passing on bad news. Cancer. Still a frightening word. Caught early, as he’d caught hers, no big problem. If she had the money for the operation. If she had the money. Jim wanted her in the hospital immediately, the sooner the better. Hospital. She closed her hands into fists and pressed them down on her betraying flesh. Money. She didn’t have it and could see no way of getting it.
    Her independence, her comfortable solitude, these were hard won and fragile, all dependent on the health of her body. There was never enough money to squeeze out insurance premiums. Never enough money for anything extra. Not for a car, though public transit here was an unfunny joke. (Even if she could afford to buy the car, she couldn’t afford the rent on an offstreet lockup, and any car left on the street overnight was stripped or stolen by morning.) Not enough for vacation trips; those she did take were for background on books so she could write them off her taxes. But with all that, she liked her life in her shabby rooms, she needed the solitude. No lovers now, no one taking up her life and energy. And she didn’t miss that … that intrusion. She smiled. Her dearly unbeloved ex-husband would be shocked out of his shoes by the way she lived, then smugly pleased. He’d been pleased enough when she stopped alimony after only a year. Not that he’d ever paid it on time. She’d gotten sick of having to go see him when the rent came due. She started her first novel and got a job in the city welfare office, wearing and poorly paid, testing her idealism to the full, but she liked most of the other workers and she liked the idea of helping people even when they proved all too fallibly human.
    The last time she saw Hrald, she sat across an office table from him and smiled into his handsome face—big blond man with even, white teeth and melting brown eyes that promised gentleness and understanding. They lied, oh how they did lie. Not trying very hard to conceal her contempt for him, she told him she wanted nothing at all from him, not now, not ever again. He was both pleased and irritated, pleased because he grudged her every cent since she was no longer endlessly promoting him to his friends and colleagues, irritated