Blue Light of Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

turned away. She went back to bed, crawled beneath the thin covers in the warm room, and stared out the window at the blue glow of Earth.
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER TWO

    It wasn’t so bad. It really wasn’t.
    She had to keep telling herself that so she wouldn’t forget. Vala was terrible company. He rarely spoke to her except in answer to her direct questions, and unless those were damned good ones, he ignored them too. He worked all day, moving from computer station to computer station in the round main room, painstakingly sifting through the internet to find information worth recording and collating. When he needed a break from this, he walked right past her to the exercise room and either ran on the incline or lifted weights. He ignored her if she came in to watch. He ignored her if she joined listlessly in. He ignored her if she ignored him. At regular intervals, he made himself a gravy boat full of colorless glop and drank it. If she happened to be in the room, she’d make herself one too and choke it down in the hopes that it counted as taking meals together. He never replied to her comments about the thick, tasteless slime, just went back to work. When he decided he was done for the day, he took another run, washed up, and sent for her. A half-hour of perfunctory, silent sex (he never began with any kind of foreplay, never made any effort to stimulate her, never encouraged her to perform beyond what it took to make him ready and then to just lean over the table, and yet, seemed strangely disappointed when it was done), and she was back in the hall on her way to her own bed.
    He never said anything mean or disparaging about humans. He never gave her patronizing looks or treated her too terrifically inferior, except for the whole you’re-here-to-serve-me attitude he kept so firmly in place around her. He didn’t push her around when she blundered into his path, and didn’t complain even when she had to be shown how to work the shower three times.
    He just ignored her.
    Skye had brought two day-planners to use as a calendar, and so she knew that it was Day 18 when she first toyed idly with the thought of flushing herself out the airlock. Oh, she’d never really do it, she knew that. She wasn’t even all that miserable, just bored. She had her puzzle books for entertainment (sixty-three of them), although they weren’t going to last even half a year at the rate she was going through them, and she had one M&M every night to remind herself that food had flavor and crunch somewhere in the universe. Sometimes she sang to herself a little when she was in the exercise room, just to remember the lyrics of her favorite songs, her not-so-favorites, even the ones she hated. Anything to hear a voice.
    She slept a lot more than she used to (with her head directly underneath the piercing blue light so she couldn’t fail to wake up the instant it lit), and sometimes she cried for no reason, but it wasn’t that bad. Certainly, it could have been a lot worse.
    If only he would talk to her.
    She was sound asleep on Day 21 when the light came on, rousing her from a tiresomely-recurrent dream of being stuck in an invisible sound-proofed box on a busy street corner. She got up yawning, checked the time, and was surprised.
    Once in a while, he sent for her at the start of his day, and always at the end, but this was smack-dab in the middle of his down-time.
    Still. It didn’t pay to keep the man waiting. She only needed to learn that lesson once.
    Skye slipped into her slinky nightie and padded down the hall to his room, doing her best to shake the sleep from her head. The door opened on blackness.
    She stood there, puzzled, listening to his heavy, sleeping breaths until her eyes had adjusted to the Earthlight enough to see him. He lay sprawled belly-down almost sideways over the bed, the thin blanket covering only part of one leg, still naked. She’d never seen his ass before. He had kind of a wide, thin tail or an armored