Touchstone 1 - Stray

collarbone and all these bad reactions I’ve had are adding up. Even though I’ve had regular meals and not really done anything since I was rescued, I’ve not put on much weight and certainly aren’t fit. They want me to get healthy and they’re going to confine the tests purely to Zan’s Telekinesis for a while. She only has the one psychic talent, with no secondary talents at all.
    She’s also going to train me. In some kind of judo, which is not exactly something I’m keen on. Hitting people is…just not me. They want to study the effect of prolonged exposure to Zan, and at the same time make me a bit more capable of surviving, should they ever decide it’s a good idea to use me in combat. I really am a potential weapon to these people.
    It’s hard to tell what Zan thinks of all this. She’s what Mum would call ‘scrrrrupulously correct’ and even though she’s trained all her life to be an incredibly deadly monster fighter, she didn’t act as if there was anything odd about teaching some unco beginner how to stand and how to step back and forward over and over again. Must be dull as hell for her.
    She did do the wide-eyed thing when they tested how I enhanced her. By herself she’s a lot stronger than Maze. With me, she can lift all the test blocks at once.
    Wednesday, January 23
    Lab Rat One
    I spent all of today having test after test in the medical labs. Ista Tremmar is polite and all, but she’s still inclined to leave me sitting on an examining table for an hour while they talk about me. If I didn’t have the interface kindergarten to keep me occupied I’d go mad.
    Maybe that’s what Zan does during our exercises – zones out and reads her email. If I ask her questions, she answers in the briefest possible way, and she never asks me anything. I miss Nenna’s chatter so much. I miss that she treated me as a person as well as an exciting curiosity.
    When I was delivered back to my box today I drew a rat on all my clothes, and wrote ‘Lab Rat One’ underneath it, making a little logo for my official designation on this world.
    Today I particularly miss Alyssa. I’ve only known Alyssa a few years, but she’s the only person I really tell things to. I hadn’t realised how important that was to me.
    Thursday, January 24
    Attitude adjustment
    Strange how going around wearing my lab rat logo makes me feel so much better. This morning’s session with Zan went well because I felt less like I was helplessly doing what I was told, and was, well, doing what I was told while wearing an ironic comment about it.
    We’re still working on stances. Step forward, step backward, over and over again, very controlled. I concentrated more on it this time, deciding I at least may as well do the best I can, even if I know that I’m never going to be really good at this kind of stuff, and will only be laughable in comparison to athletic people who have been training since they were five. I’m going to have a go at cracking Zan, too – at least get her to treat me a little less like an assignment. I don’t care if she takes a teacher/student attitude, even though she can’t be more than a year older than me, but I want some kind of interaction, some kind of response.
    I’m really curious about her now, about if she’s so serious and unsmiling all the time, and why. First Squad was a lot more open and friendly. And I know I’m not going to get a chance to work out Zan if I’m all sullen and unwilling. I mightn’t have a whole lot of power and independence in this place, but I can control the way I act and that will make me feel better.
    I’ve never thought of myself as a ‘typical’ Australian – that whole laconic and stoic thing – but I’m trying to use that attitude to cope with here. To copy Nick, who is always so calm and unfussed by everything that the world throws at him. Not super-optimistic or unbelievably Pollyanna, but he sets a great balance between dealing with the bad stuff and enjoying all the good bits. Nick would never lose sight of the fact that I’m no longer starving on Muina.
    Nick’s an ex-step-cousin. His dad was married to my Aunt Sue when we were younger, and we saw a lot of each other – all the family holidays and so forth. His dad started being an ass, so my aunt divorced him, and Nick does a lot of making sure he doesn’t go completely off the rails. We still live in the same area, though, and Mum and Aunt Sue keep including Nick in holidays as if we’re