Touchstone 1 - Stray

shower. I’m still not sure how much they monitor me while I’m in my room, and I’m really hoping that I get at least a little privacy. The shower lets me pretend I’m hiding the bad days. This was worse than usual. It’s going to be my birthday soon, and Mum had promised to organise a family and friends party at our house, and then Nick, Alyssa and I had permission to go out to actual nightclubs afterwards, so long as we stayed together and friends who hadn’t turned eighteen yet didn’t come with us. Nick was coming along to ‘protect’ us, which I of course thought was a fantastic idea for all the wrong reasons. Alyssa and I put so much effort into setting that up, all for nothing.
    I will never be Cass here. Even if I was still staying with the Lents, I would always be this ‘stray’ first and foremost and above everything else. I have this label and there’s no way to take it off. Even if I adapt to the stupid language and the nanites, all the things I spent years learning, all the stories and people which shaped me aren’t here. No-one’s read the novels I’ve read. No-one likes the music I like. No-one on this planet will be able to score people on the Orlando Bloom-meter, the way Alyssa and I used to do with all the cute guys. The only thing which speaks English is this damn diary, which I guess is why I still keep it.
    I’m so homesick I could scream.
    Sunday, February 3
    A wan shadow
    No training today. Zan took one look at me this morning and sent me straight for medical exams. I had to work very hard to convince them that the swimming wasn’t the problem, and I look really exhausted and drained just because I couldn’t get to sleep. Leaving out the bit about crying half the night and giving myself the hugest headache in the process. At least this let me know that they mustn’t be monitoring me too closely in my room.
    But I ended up spending almost all the day in the medical section, prodded and poked and sitting in machines while they got distracted trying to figure out how my enhancement abilities work. They’ve decided that the number of abilities an individual Setari has might increase the strain on my system when I enhance them. Which is why Zan is training me, since she has only the one. The experiment enhancing three from First Squad at once messed up so badly because between them those three had seventeen talents. Maze has eight all on his own, and apparently there’s a couple of Setari who have even more.
    I took the opportunity to have another argument with Ista Tremmar about why my interface had been cut back so much, and why I couldn’t at least have the access I’d had before or straightforward things like being able to see names and so forth, but she just gave me a lecture about qualifying for privileges. It didn’t work to point out that standard access was hardly a privilege, and how stupid it is to run tests which are timed for someone who has been learning their silly language since they were babies. Of course, my inability to speak that silly language with any fluidity made my arguments less than comprehensible.
    Ista Tremmar is very strict and by-the-book about a lot of things, but she did say she would review the speed of the tests. But she also told me the simplest thing would be for me to improve my language skills. Bleh.
    Monday, February 4
    Forward/Backward
    Even though I slept quite well last night, swimming practice has been postponed for a few days, which meant Zan delivered me back to my box to sit around again. On the up side, a few more of my interface functions were abruptly restored in the middle of stepping practice. No entertainment, but the minor environmental things like the names over people’s heads. Still, dull day, especially since interface classes are trying to teach me subtraction now. I wish I could pick and choose what the lessons are.
    Kanza
    That was an infinitely better afternoon than I was expecting. I’d only been back in my box a little while when there was a text popup in my head which is the equivalent of someone outside my room, knocking. Rare consideration, let me tell you, for a visitor to not just open the door.
    It was Lohn and Mara, come to kidnap me for lunch. While this was probably their own version of ‘not overlooking the psychological aspects’, I had a huge amount of trouble not bubbling over with glee and going completely hyper. Not only did I get to spend some time with the nicest people on this stupid