Isolation
Chap1
My breath echoes hollowly in my ears. The respiration mask is clamped tightly to my face. I will not be able to get this one off. I open one eye a tiny slit. There are people bending over me, also wearing respiration masks and hospital scrubs. I cough suddenly into my mask, reacting to a rough sandpapery feeling in the back of my mouth. I can remember now. I had opened my mask outside a safe place. I try to lift my arm, but realize that it is stuck to my side. I am tied to the table, completely immobile. They must have just operated on me, which would explain the sandpapery feeling of the new skin in my mouth. I had just wanted to know, to feel for the first time what it would be like without a mask, to breathe normally.
I groan loudly. This excites the people standing over me, and they start gesturing wildly while conversing among themselves. I can’t understand them, but I don’t think there is anything wrong with my ears. One of them unclips the tie binding my waist, and another the one around my arms. I sit up groggily, but one of them pushes me back down. He is wearing thick gloves, the kind with a sensor on the tip of each finger. That must be how he had unclipped the ties. They are loading me onto a stretcher now, and I do not resist. I feel exhausted, and I can remember fainting now, passing out when my lungs gave up the attempt to breathe the polluted air. I had been trying to talk to it, the huge furry gray shape, but the memory was fuzzy now. They have set me down, on a glaringly white cot in the middle of a white room with bright fluorescent lights that are already starting to give me a headache. One of them offers me a food stick, and I eat it gratefully. Immediately, I start to drift asleep. There must have been some kind of sleeping draft in the food. My vision is getting blurry again, and the last thing I see is a vision of the big shape, the wolf.
When I wake, the lights are out, but I see there is a window, which is looking out on one of the safe places. It is not the one I used to live in, though. My family’s safe spot had a stream, and next to it, miles and miles of plains. Here there are dense copses of forests, and there is water, but it is cold, fast moving, and sparkling, and not languid, warm, and green like mine. I can see movement, in a place which must be a village. I can sense now that this must be a much bigger place than the one I grew up in, with my family. There are fields of crops, and wells and small rustic huts like the ones I lived in. A knock on the door disrupts my thoughts. Before I answer, it opens, and a girl walks in. She is not much older than I am, and she has brilliant ringlet curls in a deep shade of brown.
“It was stupid, the thing you did.”
She is frowning at me.
“I wanted to speak to the wolf.”
I don't really mean to say that, but it walks out of my still smarting mouth before I can stop myself. She frowns again to herself before answering.
“They want you in the commitee chamber, if you feel up to it."
She pauses, her face breaking through the frown to form a small, hesitant smile. I think at first that she is going to say something more, but she shuts her mouth. Without giving me a chance to answer her, she walks out the door, pausing just once to tell me she will wait for me at the end of the hall. She closes the door behind her. I look around my room once more, seeing a small side table and the cot in which I spent last night. There is also a small door which I guess must lead to a bathroom. On the foot of the cot is a bundle of clothes, for which I replace my tattered cloak gratefully. The pants are made of soft white linen, and they hang loosely on my thin legs. To go with them is a brown tunic, which comes down to my knees, and a soft, navy blue cloak to go over it. The blue cloak is made out of a fine wool, warm and yet soft. They are very fine clothes, much better than any I would get at home. I take a deep breath before slowly following her out the door.
The sci-fi part is rather difficult, I think mostly cus theres just too much info for me to put in.
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