The Head Already in the Tiger's Jaws

Глава 1She awoke because the world had been reassembled. It wasn't a smooth transition, but a glitch, a flicker — as if a giant projector had lost focus for a second, and reality shattered into pixels before collapsing into a new, slightly altered configuration. Yesterday, the bars had been a monochrome engraving: strict verticals of black metal against an endless, dust-filled canvas of sky. Today, golden threads were woven between the rods — the slanted, intrusive rays of the morning sun, a great spotlight. They fractured the space, turning it into a collection of restless prisms and shadows, arranged according to the laws of an alien, unnatural geometry.The very air in the enclosure quivered, like heat haze over asphalt, and was simultaneously dense, like jelly — she remembered that word, that image from the shreds of visitors' childhood memories, sticky and sweet, like apri…