Loop by Brian Caswell Read Free Book Online Page A

left alone to unpack, but I went anyway.
    As I stood there at the door, I could feel Mrs Preston’s eyes boring holes in the back of my head from the other side of the street.
    Cassie’s story
    I answered the door and he was standing there with a plate in his hands and a nervous smile on his face.
    â€˜I … that is, my mum …’ he began nervously. ‘We thought you might like these. I’m Jamie.’
    The plate was covered with a cloth. I lifted it up and saw the scones, but of course I didn’t have a clue what they were. It doesn’t matter how well they train you, they can’t teach you everything. Being an Observer Family Class One, which is what we were, means that you learn to think on your feet.
    â€˜Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m Cassie. Cassandra. Would you like a cup of tea?’
    This is a custom on Earth – or so I’d been taught. If someone visits you, you offer them a cup of tea, then you talk to them about the weather. They can’t control it (the weather, I mean) and they never know what it will be like the next day, so they like to talk about it.
    That’s what Elidor my trainer had told me. Elidor has spent fifty years studying the Earthlings.
    Of course, Elidor didn’t know everything.
    â€˜I don’t drink tea,’ Jamie replied. ‘But if you have some orange juice …’
    Orange juice?
    I didn’t have a clue what orange juice was. I guessed it must have been a drink when he said, ‘Or anything cold. I’m dying of thirst. Hottest February in forty years they reckon.’
    Talk to them about the weather …
    â€˜I believe it is a result of a temporary climatic disturbance resulting from the combination of global warming, the El Niño effect and increased sunspot activity on the solar surface,’ I began, before I remembered that on this planet boys of my age don’t understand anything about weather patterns.
    â€˜Would you like to come in?’ I asked.
    He would.
    He did.
    Jamie’s story
    Cassie was fifteen going on forty-five. At least that’s what my dad reckoned. He met her a couple of days after my visit with the scones.
    By that time we were already friends.
    I was teaching her how to play basketball, and she was teaching me the quickest way to do my maths, which is why she was over at our house when Dad came home from work.
    â€˜She’s just very clever,’ I replied. She was my friend. I had to defend her, even if Dad wasn’t really serious.
    Still, there was something weird about Cassie. And her whole family.
    Like that first day when I’d visited. They’d only been in the house a day but there were no boxes in the lounge or any other room. In fact, there was no mess anywhere.
    They looked like they’d lived in the house forever.
    And Cassie knew more two-dollar words than Miss Duncan, my English teacher, and she was a whiz at maths and science, although she hadn’t seemed to have a clue what orange juice was.
    And even when she had managed to find me a can of lemonade, she didn’t know how to open the ring-pull.
    It was like she was half genius and half idiot.
    But she picked things up really quickly and never made the same mistake twice.
    And when she started school a couple of days later, she fitted straight in.
    I didn’t get to speak to her much at school. She wasn’t in my class for anything except French, and as soon as she arrived Rolf ‘the Hammer’ Aaronson decided she needed someone to ‘show her around’.
    â€˜Someone’ meant him.
    Which meant that it wasn’t safe to try and communicate with her between nine and three-thirty.
    They don’t call him ‘the Hammer’ because he’s good at woodwork.
    Cassie’s story
    It’s really not such a bad school. Primitive, of course. I mean, you should see the way they do maths. But it’s better than a lot of schools I’ve been to on