DIRE : BORN (The Dire Saga Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

every time I said something, that would draw a hell of a lot of attention.
    I puzzled over it for a minute, then slapped my forehead as the solution occurred to me. I had a universal remote!
    I pointed the remote at the mask, and hit the most-likely seeming button, a green key. The inside of the mask lit up like a black screen, as green words appeared. Lots of green words. Pointing the remote at various words highlighted them with a lighter shade of green, and hitting the button on the remote turned options on and off.
    After some fiddling, I found that I could turn the mask into the equivalent of a tablet computer. The inside layer of it was touch-sensitive. I also found out that it was down about an eighth of its charge. I'd have to find a way to recharge it as well.
    I had a lot of fun little toys, but they all took power to run. It looked like all of them were set up to pull power from the direct broadcast grid of the city, but the “no connection” icons on each of them told me that the grid was still down. So what did that leave? Generators? Batteries? I didn't have any of those. Were those things available in the camp? I didn't know. Thanks to my memory loss, I had no knowledge of the area, the local economies, or how affordable those items might be.
    Given the fact that the tents weren't lit up at night, I rather doubted that these items were available. It was a basic human urge, to dispel darkness, to illuminate the unseen. That we weren't doing it meant that it was unfeasible.
    I knew that. How did I know that? I rubbed my forehead, wondering at the limitations of my amnesia, wondering what had been done to my poor, abused brain. When it came to technological matters I almost seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of things. I knew what police were and I understood that homelessness on this scale was an indicator of serious social problems. I got concepts in general. Broad strokes were easy. I knew what tablet computers were. I knew that the city ran on a broadcast-energy network, a basic Tesla model that had been around for decades. But what I didn't know could fill volumes.
    I hadn't known which city I was in. I didn't know which war Roy was talking about, or who Tomorrow Force might be. I knew what books were, but I couldn't remember ever having read one. I couldn't identify the major scientists or leaders of the past century, or the one before that, but I could call to mind scientific theories and laws with names attached to them. It was all very frustrating.
    I heard footsteps approaching, so I put everything back into my backpack, forcing the zipper shut again as I looked over my shoulder. 
    “You. New one.” An unfamiliar female voice.
    “Yes?” I returned. The woman took it as an invitation, and moved the partition's entry cloth aside with one arm. A blonde woman somewhere around my age, vaguely pretty, but sturdy and taller than me. That seemed rare. I was taller than most other women I'd seen around here, and she had several inches on me. One of her eyelids was slashed with an old scar, and the eye didn't quite follow the gaze of its twin. That scar and a few others on her face seemed to bear testimony to some past trauma. She wore a purple coat that was too tight on her, and a big, striped scarf.
    “Joan is want to speak with you.” Her voice had an accent to it.
    I remembered what I had been told. “You are Minna?”
    “Yes.”
    I rose and followed her. She stopped to check on a couple of other partitioned areas as we went, at one point querying a small blonde girl with some rapid-fire torrent of words I didn't understand. The girl answered back, and Minna tousled her hair with one hand. In another room, she grabbed a bottle of water out of a styrofoam cooler, looked at me, and handed me another when I nodded and stretched out a hand. It was cold and sweet and good. Minna just grunted when I thanked her for it.
    She led me outside. In the light of the rising sun, the camp was a lot smaller