Car horns honked from somewhere outside her window. She knew without looking that she hadn’t magically materialized back home through the night. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and dragged the extra pillow over her head, hoping to block out the noise. Maybe if she couldn’t hear the noise of the city, she could convince herself everything that happened the day before had been some kind of crazy dream. Maybe if she concentrated hard enough, when she opened her eyes, she’d be in her own house back on Pleiades with the waterfall cascading down the rocks beside her house. Even the thought of the waterfall was somewhat soothing. But not enough to make her feel normal again since she was on Earth, in a noisy hotel room, hiding in a lumpy bed with scratchy linens. She opened one eye and peeked out from under the pillow. To the side of the bed, she could see the bag she’d found in the park—the one that must have been the casualty of a really hideous fashion experiment gone wrong since no fashion designer would ever purposefully choose to combine zebra stripes and hot pink.
