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It was preferable to letting my innocent sister suffer that fate.
And I couldn’t even begin to imagine it happening to my darling nieces.
That brought a hardness to me.
I formed fists from my hands at my side and raised my chin.
No matter what happened, I would handle it.
I wouldn’t let this, or the little leader, beat me.
I’d been through a lot of challenges in my life and I wasn’t about to let this one beat me.
I would meet it head-on and emerge out the other side, stronger and more resolute than ever.
I only wished my lips would stop quivering.
“Paper, Miss?”
I glanced down and noticed a homeless Chi wearing a square pair of sunglasses and perched in a battered hoverchair.
On his lap were a series of digital papers.
No doubt he had collected them from neighboring houses in the hope of selling them on, enough for a warm meal somewhere.
I had no money on me so I had to turn him down. “I’m sorry… Not today.”
“It’s all right, Miss,” the homeless Chi said. “It’s already paid for.”
He picked up the middle one and handed it to me.
It was a modern tablet computer — no thicker than a single piece of paper.
The news was stamped into the paper and lasted only one alien moon name day before it disappeared.
To get the next day’s news, you had to swipe the page over a kiosk carrying the news and it was automatically transferred over.
What was really cool was that all the materials used to create the device were biodegradable.
“Uh, thanks,” I said.
The homeless turned and began to drift away. “He said to check out the ghorlak puzzle. Said it might give you a clue.”
Give me a clue?
I turned the page over.
Doing so filtered through one newspaper page after another until I got to the back pages.
I came to the ghorlak puzzle.
It was a 3D version of a traditional crossword puzzle back home.
I wouldn’t have stood a chance of completing it as I was useless at regular puzzles, never mind 3D ones!
Thankfully, I found parts of it had already been filled in.
I didn’t think the little leader had done a good job as none of the words fit.
