****
Tracy had explored the room where they were held captive several times using touch alone before discovering the old-fashioned wall-switch and toggling 'on' the dim ceiling light. It was a small light source: an old-time florescent light bulb, it looked like.
The light revealed a small room with a toilet and sink at one end and a thin floor pad at the other for sleeping. There was nothing else. There weren't even any visible doors or windows. There was certainly no wall thermostat driven control box to adjust room temperature. Tracy estimated the room temperature to be about sixty degrees: far too cool for perfect human comfort but at least they weren't freezing. Dressed in their winter clothing they would get on well enough. The walls were of heavy sheet-metal, which explained why her implant picked up no radio wave signals. Even telepathic messages were apparently blocked.
"Whoever you are you won't get away with this!" Tracy announced aloud.
There was no answer.
"Why did you do this? What do you want?" she demanded.
Silence.
"I'm really hungry!" said Mouse.
A metallic scraping sound echoed through the room, and a six-inch square opening in a wall appeared momentarily three feet above the floor, just long enough for two plastic-wrapped sandwiches to be pushed through it and fall onto the floor, before the opening clanged shut again.
Mouse rushed to eagerly retrieve the food, but Tracy insisted on examining the sandwiches carefully before tasting them. She quickly concluded that they looked and smelled like fresh and normal ham and cheese with mustard on rye sandwiches. "I don't know for sure if it's safe to eat these," she said, "but this food seems to be perfectly OK as far as I can tell." Indeed, the meat and cheese were relatively exotic; beans, rice, and other cheaper foods lower on the food chain had become the mainstay foods for most Americans.
"Maybe we should wait to eat as long as we can," said Mouse. "I don't eat meat anyway."
"Me either, but I suppose we'll need to make an exception since this is the only food that has been provided."
"You are directed to eat the food," said a voice from the wall, the same voice they had heard earlier.
"Why should we?" countered Tracy.
"Your continued life at this time is of value," said the voice. "Obey or risk your immediate elimination."
Tracy bit into a sandwich. It tasted yummy, and she suddenly realized how very hungry she was. She was going to tell Mouse to delay eating for a few minutes until the safety of the food was further confirmed by her own reaction to it, but Mouse was already rapidly eating the other sandwich.
"I forgot how nasty eating meat is," said Tracy.
"I forgot how yummy it is," said Mouse.
As they ate they each in their own way continued to assess their situation. Mouse used her telepathic sense and her implants to both send and try to detect communications, with no results. She had never before been in a place so telepathically silent as this one. Interfering electrical signals were probably being sent through the walls of their prison to further confound any possible communications, she and Tracy reasoned.
Tracy tried to think of who their captors might be, and why they had been kidnapped. Her best guess was some sort of radicalized human group; the world was now full of them. Maybe they sought to influence her mother. Whoever it was they were clever, dangerous, and coldly efficient, but at least they made a damn good ham and cheese on rye sandwich. With mustard.
****