Splintered Energy (The Colors Book 1) Read Free Page A

AM
    Friday, July 8th
     
     
    Red droplets on the creature’s face were so pretty.
    The fragile thing had crumpled with barely a touch. He shoved it and its orange covering aside and reached for its broken lip. He brought his strange hand upward, sniffed metallic impurities, and found his tongue.
    The beautiful fluid disappeared!
    Rage pounded within him, and he bounced to his feet. He didn’t know what he was, where, or why he was here. Everything was wrong. The light sparkled unsteadily. It radiated from a small disc rising into an ugly vastness above him, an oppressive blue to which there seemed no end. On a much lower level, the currents smelled nice, but he felt vastly outnumbered—surrounded by unpleasant-green stalk creatures, reaching toward the equally unpleasant-blue.
    He began to run. Bombarded by a multitude of sounds, anger jolted through him. Things, himself included, moved extremely slow. Bizarre surroundings blurred by, and he noticed a clearing with a structure nestled back from the safe-black pavement underfoot. It could bring shelter from the crushing weirdness. He slunk around it until an opening allowed him to peek inside—very ugly in there.
    When he tapped the clear substance, it shattered into a terrible mess. A bitter grunt burst from his lips, and his muscles tensed. In a fluid leap, he cleared the broken space to enter.
    The bursts of wrong color everywhere enraged him. Deadly strips of white outlining the room taught him fear. Nothing made sense, but somehow he remained pure and untaken.
    A raised-structure was centered in the area. He flinched from the colorful and deadly images on the walls and came to a halt. Attached to a wall, a mass similar in size and shape to the orange clad creature faced him. Mimicked movements reflected back at him. This was him? Trapped in a strange form? He ran fingers through dirty-red tangled hair falling past his shoulders. His skin tone wasn’t right. Not bright enough. Nothing was as it should be, except the clean light shining from his optical units.
    A facial image sat, propped on the dresser. The tiny creature’s optical openings had a dull blue center circled by dead-white. Short wisps of hair—ugly yellow—fell about its face. The moment he grasped it, the picture disintegrated into another disarray of broken glass. Frustration seemed a constant in this strange world.
    He fixated on a pair of optical coverings. There’d been much terror radiating from the creature he’d hit, as if beautiful optical-units frightened it. He shoved them on his face, splintering them. Anger shuddered through him as he strode toward a much smaller area, the door ajar. Inside the comforting dark space, things hung in his way.
    Intolerable had a solution.
    He flung a green piece of clothing behind him, and it slid under the bed. More wrong followed, until finally only safe ones remained. He snorted. What kind of monster coexisted with such hues? He yanked the door closed behind him, cracking the frame, and shutting the weirdness out.
    A soft black shirt clutched in his hands, he huddled. Time passed while his anxiety escalated. With billions of sounds to filter, his head hurt so badly his brain wouldn’t work. He rubbed his fingers, hard, along his temples. Not easy. But he pushed out the racket, lowered the pounding ache so he could concentrate on the immediate vicinity. He listened to two beings run into the shelter through a different opening than the one he’d made. A stream of noise with a mechanical pitch joined the chatter between the two creatures.
    One of them sounded twenty-two steps away, twenty-one, twenty…
    Let the unknown come to him. Every muscle coiled, he waited. Tiny feet treading in a clumsy pattern informed him its size would be pitiful.
    The approaching being called out, “If you touched my new shirt I’ll kill you.  Tell Mom I swiped it from the mall, and see what happens to you.”
    Its high-pitched vocal tones were unpleasant. Had it