Displaced

Timber - Thirty-Eight

After my shower, we all started to settle in for the night. Lara curled up against me, practically sitting in my lap as I tried to work on a crossword puzzle. Man, I was just like my dad. Crossword puzzles were such an "old person" thing to do, but it was the most I could do to keep myself entertained. There might have been something going on outside of the room for all I knew. I couldn't leave the girls alone. Doing that at night seemed wrong. Rumor was proof there were crazies out there. Any of those crazies could come and hurt them, or me. Who's to say Rumor wasn't waiting for me to get out alone again so she could attack, so to speak.

Yeah, I know, I was kind of paranoid.

All of the boredom was making me tired anyway. I hated that. Having nothing to do, so instead of finding something, I just wanted to sleep for hours upon hours and be lazy. I was looking forward to Paul showing up and giving me a job. At that point, I'd do just about anything.

Lara gazed up at me and then down at the puzzle book in my hands. "Can we turn on the TV again?"

I glanced at Chevelle. "Feel up for that?"

Sure, we could just watch cartoons or something else equally innocent. The temptation to see what else was going on was great, though.

Chevelle sighed and nodded. "Keep the remote away from me."

"Got it," I said and turned on the television. The screen blipped to life and we were greeted with something new. Instead of going straight to whatever channel we had last left it on, there was a cheesy weather display for the week. All sunshine, of course. That stayed on for a few seconds before a new picture showed up listing all of the events for the week.

I laughed. "There's a barbeque-slash-ice-cream-social on half-day? What is half-day?"

"No clue. I noticed that about the weather thing. There aren't normal days on there, or numbers either," Chevelle said.

"Interesting. Still, barbeque, that might be worth checking out." She groaned. I held my hands up in defense. "I'm joking! But we probably should go anyway. If anything, for the food, but we might get to see more, learn more. Some people have been here for a while."

She shrugged. "Paul, yeah."

"No, there are others too. I met a woman on my jog. She seemed to have a good idea on how things worked, and knows how to milk it for her advantage." I shivered at the way Rumor had vowed to own me.

Chevelle raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"I'll tell you about it later." Definitely did not want to get into it in front of Lara.

I changed the channel. Next was cartoons, cartoons for preschoolers, to be more specific. The next station was something similar to one of those home shopping channels, only instead of money needed it said "trade negotiable" or that the item was worth X amount of credits. So there was currency on this spaceship, but there was also bartering. Interesting. I'd have to check that out later. The channel after that was a black and white movie of some kind. I couldn't identify it off the top of my head. Next up was sports, old sports at that. Finally, there were classic cartoons on the last channel. The kind I had grown up with back when I was around the same age as Lara. Our selection of entertainment had been drastically cut.

Blinking, I could only stare at the screen in disbelief. Clearing my throat, I nudged Lara. "What are you in the mood for?"

"This is good!" She curled back against me, resting her head on my chest.

I briefly met Chevelle's gaze with my own. Her jaw was dropped and I noticed a desperation in her eyes. Not that I blamed her. The one source for any kind of reassurance that her friend was still alive was now gone. What troubled me the most was that the Achlivans were clearly trying to keep us in the dark. They were renaming our days, messing with our sense of time in general, and taking away our right to know things.

Chevelle and I definitely needed to have a pow-wow later about things.