Touchstone 1 - Stray by Andrea K. Höst Read Free Book Online

if you’re high up. What bushes and trees there are aren’t so big and thick that anything large could go any distance without being spotted. If the Ming Cats hunt here, they do it at night.
    Today’s project was to block the windows on the ground floor. Fort Cass is still far from impregnable, but every bit helps. I wish my eyes would stop blurring.
    Saturday, December 15
    Buttered scones would hit the spot
    After winding wool into a rough handle for the longest of my salvaged knives, and ‘sharpening’ it by scraping it against rocks, I walked back along the lake to chop long poles of bamboo from a stand I’d passed. It was surprisingly easy, but I’m so tired now and it’s barely lunchtime. I’m the kind of lumberjack who needs nanna naps.
    Sunday, December 16
    OMGWTF!
    There were two people in my room when I woke up.
    They were standing at the top of the stair, talking to each other. Opening my eyes in the grey of just-dawn and seeing these hazy black figures, my heart gave such a thump. And I squeaked and scurried backward and then felt like a complete dick as they just looked down at me and turned out not to be monsters after all.
    A guy and a girl, dressed in tight-fitting black stuff, some kind of uniform. They looked to be Asian (black hair and eyes and a creamy-gold skin, though the girl’s eyes didn’t have that fold). I couldn’t understand what they said to me, didn’t even recognise the sound of the language, but the tone wasn’t threatening. Annoyed or irritated, perhaps, but I didn’t get ‘prepare to die’ vibes off them.
    They were surveying my room but not touching anything, and didn’t seem too keen on getting close to me, either. I was foolishly glad I’d only just cleaned up, and all my food was neatly separated in bowls with no rubbish lying about. That I was wearing my underpants. One, the girl, started talking to me, asking questions, and I tried talking back, and was trying not to cry because they were people and even though they understood me as little as I understood them, THEY WERE PEOPLE!! It was all I could do not to scream and throw myself at them.
    They had a little talk, then the guy went up to the roof and the girl gestured at me to follow her. I put on my shoes first, and packed my backpack since she didn’t seem to mind waiting around, though she kept her distance from me and kept scanning the room as if she suspected I had someone hidden behind a jar. I immediately started thinking about plagues, and wondered if that was why the town was abandoned.
    She led me down to the lakeshore and stopped at a rock and pointed to me and then to the rock, and when I sat down she walked off. But that was okay because I was busy looking at the ship on the lake.
    Not a boat. A narrow metal arrowhead shaped thing, creamy-grey with dark blue side sections. It’s big enough to be carrying dozens of people, and is definitely not primitive. Whoever these people are, they’re more advanced than Earth.
    The two in black weren’t overwhelmingly surprised to see me here, or very interested. They acted as if they hadn’t expected to see me, and put me aside while they went on with whatever it is they’re really here for.
    I saw another pair of them, also black-clad, standing up at the central bluff, but then something came out of the ship. A flat platform which floated above the water, and stopped right next to the bank where I was sitting, delivering two women, older than the pair from Fort Cass, and wearing a mix of dark green and darker green, not quite so tight-fitting as the black outfit. Again they were all business, pointing at me and then one particular corner of their platform and very stern about it.
    It’s not like I was going to say ‘no’, hopping on very meek, and standing exactly where I was put. The platform began moving straight away, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what they were doing to control it. Maybe someone back at the ship was steering.
    They