Going Grey by Karen Traviss Page A

The dog pressed close to his legs as he stood on the porch.
    Every landmark in Ian's life had disappeared; family, identity, and even the fragile future he'd thought he had. The only immediate truth was that he'd struggle to look after the animals on his own. Roger the ram looked back at him with an expression of baffled, slit-eyed betrayal before trudging up the ramp.
    Ian held out an envelope of dollar bills. "That's towards their feed," he said. "Thanks, Joe."
    "No need." Joe waved the money away. "We're going to be awash with eggs. Just call me when you need a ride. The bus takes forever."
    Ian pressed the envelope into his hand anyway. He wanted Joe gone, not because he didn't like the guy but because the longer he hung around, the more likely Joe was to see him morph .  There: he'd given it a name now. It seemed as good a word as any. How had he made it through the lonely funeral and scattering of the ashes without morphing? He was sure he hadn't changed again. He needed to understand what caused it.
    I change. I really do change.
    I'm a freak. And Kinnery designed me that way.
    Joe bolted the tailgate and the truck rumbled away, leaking plaintive bleats. Ian watched it out of sight before he turned around and almost tripped over Oatie.
    "We'll be fine," he told the dog. "I've just got to get my head straight. Go through Gran's stuff. Okay?"
    Oatie's expression said yeah, and then what ? Ian read the leaflet on bereavement that the funeral home had given him and concentrated on the paragraph that said it was normal to feel confused, angry, and all kinds of strange, unconnected things when someone died. Everything the leaflet described had happened, even the weird bits about sex. In the last few days, Ian had veered from being unable to think about anything else except girls he'd never meet to not caring if he did and then not even eating for a day. He couldn't sleep, either.
    He was a mess. Maybe the roller coaster of moods and hormones would start him morphing again, but when he made himself take a look in the bathroom mirror, he didn't seem to be much different to the last time he'd studied his reflection.
    She wasn't my real gran.
    But she's dead. And I miss her.
    What am I going to do when the money runs out? Kinnery won't live forever either.
    Ian re-read Gran's letter to convince himself that this wasn't some incredibly detailed hallucination. If it was, at least it was consistent. Not a word in the notes had changed. Oatie leaned against his legs.
    "No good looking to me for guidance, buddy," Ian said, rubbing the dog's ears. "I haven't even worked out how to get the bus into town to buy groceries yet."
    He left Oatie in the kitchen with a bowl of canned dog food and a packet of cookies to distract him while he carried on clearing the house. The compulsion gripped him. He needed to do something, anything , to stop the thoughts bouncing around in his head. Then it became a frenzy, dragging everything out of closets and cupboards, sorting through every piece of paper he could find, and stacking whatever he didn't need to burn later.
    His gut kept telling him to run away and find somewhere where nobody knew him, but the voice of common sense reminded him that not only did nobody know him around here anyway, but he also had no plan yet for finding a job and somewhere else to live. He couldn't even risk driving anywhere without a licence. Eventually, traffic cameras would pick him up. Gran had warned him about that.
    The voice was still in his head. Run, Ian. Run. You've got to be ready.
    He was eighteen; he might as well have been eight. The scale of the outside world that he'd have to confront began to crush him. His scalp tightened. He was too scared to go check his reflection this time. He felt like an alien who'd landed on Earth with a knowledge of the language and culture but no idea how to apply it.
    If he was going to have any kind of life — even something as simple as buying a pint of milk, let alone