Blind Lake Read Free

set, by the Department of Energy. That’s why the houses and shops and office buildings were so sparse and so new and why they began and ended so abruptly in a vast and empty land.
    Tess walked by herself. She was eleven years old and she hadn’t made any friends at school yet, though Edie Jerundt (whom the other children called Edie Grunt) at least spoke to her once in a while. But Edie walked the other way home, toward the mallway and the administrative buildings; the tall cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, far away to the west, were Tessa’s landmark. Tess—when she was with her father, at least, which was one week out of four—lived in one of a row of pastel-colored town houses pressed up one against the next like soldiers at attention. Her mother’s house, though even farther west, was almost identical.
    She had stayed twenty minutes late at school, helping Mr. Fleischer clean the boards. Mr. Fleischer, a man with a white-brown beard and a bald head, had asked her a lot of questions about herself—what she did when she was home, how she got along with her parents, whether she liked school. Tess had answered dutifully but unenthusiastically, and after a while Mr. Fleischer had frowned and stopped asking. Which was perfectly okay with her.
    Did she like school? It was too early to tell. School had hardly started. The weather wasn’t even cool yet, though the wind that brushed the sidewalk and flapped her skirt had a touch of autumn in it. You couldn’t tell about school, Tess thought, until at least Halloween, and Halloween was still a couple of weeks away. By then you knew how it would be—for better or worse.
    She didn’t even know if she liked Blind Lake, the town-not-a-town near the lake-not-a-lake. Crossbank had been better, in some ways. More trees. Autumn colors. Snow on the hills in winter. Her mother had said there would be snow here, too, and plenty of it, and maybe this time she would make friends to go sledding with. But the hills seemed too low and gentle for proper sledding. Trees were sparse here, mostly saplings planted around the science buildings and the shopping concourse. Like trees imperfectly wished-for, Tess thought. She passed some of these on the lawns of the town houses: trees so new they were still staked to the earth, still trying to take root.
    She came to her father’s small house and saw that his car wasn’t in the driveway. He wasn’t home yet. That was unusual but not unheard-of. Tess used her own key to let herself inside. The house was ruthlessly tidy and the furniture still smelled new, welcoming but somehow unfamiliar. She went to the narrow, gleaming kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator. Some of the juice spilled over the lip of the glass. Tess thought about her father, then took a paper towel and wiped the tiled counter clean. She deposited the balled-up evidence in the bin under the sink.
    She carried her drink and a napkin into the living room, stretched out on the sofa, and whispered “Video” to turn on the entertainment panel. But there was nothing except static on any of the cartoon channels. The house had saved a couple of programs for her from yesterday, but they were dull ones—
King Koala, The Unbelievable Baxters
—and she wasn’t in the mood. She guessed there must be something wrong with the satellite, because there was nothing else to see, either… only the closed-circuit feed from the downloads, Lobster City nighttime, the Subject motionless and probably asleep under a naked electric light.
    Her phone buzzed deep in her schoolbag on the floor at her feet, and Tess sat up abruptly. A mouthful of orange juice went down the wrong way. She fumbled the phone out and answered, hoarsely.
    “Tessa, is that you?”
    Her father.
    She nodded, which was useless, then said, “Yes.”
    “Everything okay?”
    She assured him she was fine. Daddy always wanted to know whether she was okay. Some days he asked more than once. To Tess