You are Zelda, and you are eleven years old.
You have the following skills.
- Piano
- Formal Etiquette
- Language (English) [+]
- Mathematics
You put down your pen on the desk. Beside it, square with the edge of the table, is your homework. It's all homework by a strict definition of the word, since you're home schooled, but since your math tutor isn't present it's homework, not schoolwork.
Figures run down the page in neat lines, each line of equations starting at the left-hand margin and continuing until there was no more room, and then resuming on the next line with a half-inch indentation. You check through the stack one last time, then nod. They're correct.
You close the textbook and pick up the familiar weight, sliding it back onto the shelf in the corner of your study room. You have a study room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and even a living room of your own with a giant picture window that looks out over the garden, which is grand.
It's very nice here.
Next is English, and you eye that book with quiet dread. You aren't Melville's biggest fan.
But you slide the math work into its folder and set it aside for the tutor when he comes tomorrow, then open the classic of American literature to the chapter on whales.
As it turns out, there are many more chapters on whales than the first. How . . . interesting.
When that's done you stand up and stretch. Your dress shifts around you in the cool, dry air, and you go to your bedroom to retrieve a tube of Chap Stick for your lips. The bit window catches your attention on your way, though, so you stand by it for a few minutes, looking down at the garden.
The roses are blooming.
They climb the inner wall en masse, turning the chain links into great green wall seven feet tall. Beyond that lies the rest of your family's grounds, and you dimly remember walking through them, or being carried. But that was years ago, before . . .
. . . Before everything. Before the top floor of your family's home was torn apart and rebuilt to be airtight, with its own separate air conditioner that diverted the charge from the strange radiation in the air into other things. Before you only saw your parents in transparent plastic masks and white suits. Before your mother saw her reflection and realized she was turning into a freak too.
Before your mother left and never came back.
You're not supposed to know, but the cleaning staff talk when they think you aren't listening, and their face masks don't muffle their voices as much as they think they do, and you never ever forget.
Outside the ten foot stone walls surrounding your home, people are being turned into monsters, inhuman things.
Your ears have a very slight point.
It's your condition. You're very delicate, especially to whatever's in the air outside, so you listen to your father and don't put up a fuss.
But all the same you're curious as to whether being different might not be so bad.
. . . You'll figure that out later. It's time for snacks, and Monday is Oreos and milk.
Will the roses bloom again this year?
[] Yes. There's not a hard frost, so they'll bloom again.
[] Not this year. Winter will be here too soon.
[] No. You're surprised they're blooming now, actually.
What color is your hair?
[] Blonde
[] Golden
[] Brown