Red Desert - Point of No Return Read Online Free Page A

hordes of tourists, trying to ignore my stomach, which
reacted with violence every time the scent of hot waffles reached
my nostrils. Normally I would eat as soon as I woke, but I’d left
my bed too late. Now I was counting on that working breakfast to
avoid fainting from hunger, provided that I got there in one
piece.
    I felt my coat’s left
sleeve hook into something moving in the opposite direction,
forcing me to spin round. During that clumsy movement my bag
slipped from my shoulder, scattering most of its contents on the
ground.
    “Shit!” Dispirited, I
looked at the disaster. There was no doubt I would be late now. I
bent down to collect the myriad objects, while people continued to
move around me without even slowing down.
    “Excuse-moi,
mademoiselle, je suis désolé,” a man’s voice said. Its owner
squatted down to help me.
    “Don’t bother,” I
replied in a huff, while retrieving my compact, which had opened as
a consequence of its fall, spreading its powder everywhere. The
mirror was broken. “Great, that’s really made my day lucky.”
    “Allow me to help you
out,” the man insisted.
    He was speaking
English with a weird accent. Even though he had addressed me in
French a moment earlier, that didn’t seem to be his mother tongue.
His voice intrigued me so much that I raised my head to look at him
and was almost blinded. His hair was red and his eyes green. His
face, covered by a few days’ growth of beard, was sprinkled with
freckles. He wasn’t the most gorgeous man I had ever seen, he
didn’t even get anywhere near my aesthetic ideal, yet there was
something penetrating in his stare. He emanated a magnetic charm.
He was crouched at half a metre from me and, despite the cold and
the heavy coat he was wearing, I could swear I picked up the scent
of his skin.
    “I do apologise,” I
said, while putting the remaining objects into my handbag. “I
didn’t want to be rude.” I stood up, embarrassed, and he did the
same, then he smiled, amused. I couldn’t help but reciprocate the
smile.
    “No worries.” He kept
on staring at me. “I was in a hurry, it was my fault.”
    At that moment I
realised that I had almost forgotten about my appointment.
    “Blast it! I really
must go.” There was urgency in my words, but for some reason I
wasn’t able to move.
    “So do I,” the man
said, indicating with his hand a direction that was opposite to
mine.
    I looked at him for
some instants more, hoping something would happen to prolong the
encounter. I would have liked to ask him to come with me. I didn’t
care about NASA or Mars anymore. He opened his mouth and for a
moment I thought he was about to speak, but he didn’t.
    “Sorry again,” was all
I could say. I waved him goodbye, before turning and walking
off.
    Five minutes later I
was seated at a table inside the restaurant, alone. I checked my
watch nervously. The place was right, and the time was too. The
table had been booked on behalf of Moore, but when I’d arrived she
wasn’t there. I took the opportunity to pull myself together and
rearrange my bag. I had thrown everything into it in a jumble
without paying much attention, and now I had a constant feeling
that something was missing.
    “Doctor Anna Persson,”
I heard someone calling me. A man in his forties came closer to the
table and held his hand out to me. “I’m Dennis Francis.”
    I had been expecting
to meet Ms Moore; but standing in front of me was the deputy
director of one of the most important departments in NASA. He was
younger than I thought he would be and now that I saw him I
realised his face wasn’t unknown to me. I would have expected that
the deputy director would be just a functionary, but that was a
real astronaut. He had become famous a decade earlier as the
spokesman of the mission for the installation of a permanent base
on the edges of Shackleton Crater, at the Moon’s South Pole; the
only area of our satellite that remains almost always lit by the
sun,