Unnaturals by Lynna Merrill Read Free Book Online

happy. Happiness was a main ingredient of Lucasta, Annabella, and the rest.
    But Mel knew about the City of Life and the City of Death, and she hated Lucasta and Annabella.
    They put her on the train and boarded it with her, told her that now she'd sleep, and so would they.
    She said, "No, I won't sleep."
    They said, "All right."
    They stayed awake, too. It made them very uncomfortable. The trip took hours, the train's wheels softly clattering in the semi-darkness of the intercity underground. They could use their computers, of course. Mel thought that if they could not, these two wouldn't have endured. The interweb connection was bad. At least, Mel knew it as a bad connection because of all the old articles she'd read. It took seconds, sometimes minutes to access a feed. Messages took the same time to come. Some messages came garbled, while others, she thought, didn't come at all.
    Her guards' eyes were darting now towards their computers, now towards Meliora, now towards the barely-lit walls outside. Their shoulders were hunched, their hands white and tight on their computers.
    Meliora hugged her knees and stared at the empty stone walls outside. So much stone in one place, covered by nothing. There truly was nothing to see. She closed her eyes.
    "Yes," the woman said, "this is better. You don't have to look at it for the whole time."
    Meliora's eyes jerked open at these words. Then, for a moment—just for a moment—she glimpsed a strange shadow flicker outside among the stones. A door, she was sure of it.
    When she got out of the train in Lucasta, it was brightlights, and she looked at the ball in the sky. It hurt, so she looked away. She didn't want to damage her eyes. She didn't trust those who would repair them.
    ***
    The man and the woman from Annabella left Meliora at her doctor's office. He wasn't there. A strange woman was in his place. Her hair was very black, even though blonde, bright red, and electric blue were currently in fashion. It was pulled back in an unfashionable tight bun. Her eyes were too narrow, her face too pale, her lips too thin.
    When Mel looked closer, she realized that neither the eyes nor the lips were fixed like this; they were normal-sized but looked smaller because of the woman's facial muscles. Facial muscles were taught at school: how to better arrange them to have a more beautiful, happier smile because if people were happy, they smiled, and if people smiled happily, they became happy. It went both ways.
    This woman looked as if she'd been taught how to be un happy. As if she'd passed through the mall's theater but hadn't gotten fixed up.
    "What are you staring at!?"
    Meliora hadn't heard that tone of voice for a long time. Parents and teachers would sometimes, if rarely, use it with a small child who said " I want to pull the grass from the ground and throw it, " or " I want to kick the dog, " or " I want to hit my friend. " Children could say things like this. Then, they outgrew them.
    "I am staring at you! " Meliora snapped back. "It should be clear for anyone with eyes to see!" She didn't offer her name and interweb address.
    "Well, stop staring. Go look into a mirror if you wish—because, silly girl, right now you look just like me."
    Narrowed eyes, pursed lips, perhaps a pale face—Meliora's knuckles, at least, were pale white from squeezing her hands into fists, so why not the face, too? Yes, she could believe this.
    "I am not like you," she said quietly. She didn't have tiny, barely noticeable lines cutting into her skin at the sides of her eyes and mouth. Neither did she have glasses—those over-the-eyes contraptions of frame and glass that sometimes became fashionable but currently weren't. "You're like Great-Granddad Nicolas—whoever, whatever you are. I am not. But, you're not nice like him."
    "Hmph. Not that you're nice," the woman said. "I am Doctor Eryn 0x12A0A919, and you shall address me with respect."
    It was an order. Mel knew this from the old feeds. No one gave