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1AWAKE
Stella
I wake up in a white room.
Smells like… nothing.
That’s weird.
I lie still for a long moment. Maybe several. My brain feels like someone hit the pause button on something very important. Something I can’t entirely remember. I sit up. Things hurt. I feel thirsty. I feel hungry. A surge of temper brings me to my feet. I don’t knowwhyI’m angry. I only know that I am angry.
I don’t know where I am, and instead of confusing me, that just infuriates me.
But what really annoys me is what happens next.
I try to walk away from the bed, and within about three steps I run nose-first into an invisible barrier. Like a glass wall, except it’s not the kind of glass that shatters. It’s the kind of glass that makes your bang your nose.
I curse loudly and kick the invisible barrier. I guess it’s not super smart if it is glass, in case it is glass, but I’m already in motion. And I’m stubbing my toe. And now my nose and my toe both hurt, and swearing at the top of my lungs only goes so far toward making either of those painful indignities any less painful.
“Where the fuck am I?”
Nobody answers, because nobody is here.
I must have been caught. But that doesn’t make sense, because if I’d been caught, I’d be back in the city or in a hospital. But hospitals smell like something, and this doesn’t.
“Hey! Anybody there! Let me out!”
A girl appears. She’s around my age, with long pink hair. She looks very, very cool, and she looks like she comes from the city. That makes me feel a little better, and a little worse. Better, because city people are familiar. Worse, because it makes me feel like I’ve definitely been captured.
“Hey,” she says. “You’re awake.”
She looks… I don’t know. Pink hair, smug expression, cool clothes. She looks like someone I’d be friends with if I wasn’t so thoroughly freaked out and angry at finding myself in some weird captivity.
“How do I get out of this bubble thing? I can’t see the fucking walls, but I keep walking into them.”
“They wouldn’t like if I let you out,” she says with a grin that suggests she’s probably thinking of doing that anyway.
“Who is they? Are you working for city security?”
She snorts at me. “Do I look like I work for city security?”
“You look like a hooker,” I blurt.
“Aw thanks, that’s sweet,” she says, immediately taking it as a compliment. “I’m Jennifer. What’s your name?”
“Stella,” I say.
“Stella. Cool name. Do you remember how you got here?”
“I ran from the city. I guess I’m back somewhere in it?”
She laughs. Hard. Too hard.
“You are so far from the city,” she giggles. “You’re going to lose your mind when you find out where you are.”
“Where am I?”
“I don’t think I should tell you that yet. I don’t think they’d like that either.”
