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

visible. I can’t guess why these people all live mounded up here when there’s acre upon acre of lake and forest left to some cats. I keep trying to spot anything which will show me that it’s definitely the same planet. But there’s nothing but whitestone buildings and water, and it’s too cloudy to see sun or moon. Quite a lot of futuristic air traffic. I bounced up and down for a while, thinking that maybe the gravity was a fraction less, but if there’s a difference it’s subtle enough to be dismissed as imagination.
    None of my belongings were with me, not even my watch, so I don’t know how long I sat around, but finally a man showed up with a tray of food. He was wearing the same sort of uniform as the rest, but in shades of purple and violet, and was the first person who acted like I was interesting rather than a little problem which had to be tidied away. He gawked at me, in other words, and asked a bunch of questions I had no way of understanding or answering, all in the time it took him to cross and put the tray on the table. One of the greensuits was waiting outside, or I expect he would have stayed and gawked some more. I felt like I was one of those kids found raised by wolves or something.
    I dove on the food as soon as the door closed. There were two slices of warm yellow cakey stuff. Not sweet. Some kind of heavy bread? Fruit in jelly where all of the fruit pieces were like butterfly-shaped grapes. A stack of vegetables in sticks – green and white and yellow sticks, all apparently growing naturally to the thickness and length of my little finger. The yellow ones tasted like carrot trying to be celery, the white was zingy and the green very salty. I spent ages on the last of the grapes, trying to work out if grapes would really naturally grow to look so much like butterflies. They tasted like vanilla apples with grape texture.
    The way I shovelled all this down my throat, you’d never guess I once wouldn’t eat anything other than chips and gravy for dinner. I didn’t grow out of that till I was in high school and still occasionally annoy Mum with things I’d refuse to even try. But when you’ve spent a good half hour pondering whether to eat the wormy bits of your red pears for the protein – and even tried a bite – then no-one gets to call you fussy any more.
    After an age the pinksuited person came back and took the tray, and the greensuit gave me my backpack, so now I have this diary again and my watch and everything. Even my clothes, clean but very battered. And next?
    Unobservant
    After hours stuck in this room I finally realised that the cupboard wasn’t the only internal door. I probably wouldn’t have even worked out the cupboard if it hadn’t been left slightly open. When it’s shut, there’s just a bit of a dint and if you push the dint the door moves in then slides into the wall. So eventually I spotted another dint, over near the more obvious door to the hall. And it was a door and I have my own bathroom.
    Then, after the world’s longest shower, I was sorting through my things and I found they’d somehow recharged my mobile. Even though I’d kept it off almost all the time, the battery had run down after a couple of weeks. I immediately played all my song ring tones, over and over. Five whole songs, and a few partial songs. That made me cry.
    And now I have games! No mobile signal whatsoever, which isn’t a surprise, but trivial entertainment for the win!
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    Two greensuits came and escorted me to two greysuits: the same woman and a younger man. I think I’m in some sort of security wing of a military hospital. Everyone’s in uniform.
    The headache from that injection is worse, and wasn’t helped by more poking and prodding and taking blood samples and putting me in odd machines. It was very tedious, interesting only because I couldn’t see any way they were controlling all but a few